{"id":378,"date":"2013-10-16T09:55:27","date_gmt":"2013-10-16T09:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/a-10-step-guide-to-make-your-research-paper-abstract-more-effective\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:45:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:45:40","slug":"a-10-step-guide-to-make-your-research-paper-abstract-more-effective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/a-10-step-guide-to-make-your-research-paper-abstract-more-effective","title":{"rendered":"A 10-step guide to make your research paper abstract more effective"},"content":{"rendered":"

An abstract is like a movie trailer. It offers a preview, highlights key points, and helps the audience decide whether to view the entire work.\u00a0Abstracts are the pivot of a research paper because many journal editorial boards screen manuscripts only on the basis of the abstract. <\/span><\/p>\n

If your abstract doesn\u2019t grab their attention and make a good first impression, there\u2019s a good chance your research paper will be rejected at the outset. Moreover, even after your research paper is published, your abstract will be the first, and possibly only, thing readers will access through electronic searches. They will only consider reading the rest of the manuscript if they find your abstract interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n

For studies in the humanities and social sciences, the abstract is typically descriptive. That is, it describes the topic of research and its findings but usually doesn\u2019t give specific information about methods and results. These abstracts may also be seen in review articles or conference proceedings. In scientific writing, on the other hand, abstracts are usually structured to describe the background, methods, results, and conclusions, with or without subheadings.<\/p>\n

Now how do you go about fitting the essential points from your entire paper\u2014 why the research was conducted, what the aims were, how these were met, and what the main findings were\u2014into a paragraph of just 200-300 words? It\u2019s not an easy task, but here\u2019s a 10-step guide that should make it easier:<\/p>\n

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  1. Begin writing the abstract after you have finished writing your paper.<\/li>\n
  2. Pick out the major objectives\/hypotheses and conclusions from your Introduction<\/em> and Conclusion<\/em> sections.<\/li>\n
  3. Select key sentences and phrases from your Methods<\/em> section.<\/li>\n
  4. Identify the major results from your Results<\/em> section.<\/li>\n
  5. Now, arrange the sentences and phrases selected in steps 2, 3, and 4 into a single paragraph in the following sequence: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusions.<\/li>\n
  6. Make sure that this paragraph does not contain\n