Writing abstracts

An abstract is a self-contained, short, and powerful statement that describes a larger work. Components vary according to discipline; an abstract of a social science or scientific work may contain the scope, purpose, results, and contents of the work.

An abstract is not a review, nor does it evaluate the work being abstracted. While it contains key words found in the larger work, the abstract is an original document rather than an excerpted passage.

You may write an abstract for various reasons. The two most important are selection and indexing. Abstracts allow readers who may be interested in a longer work to quickly decide whether it is worth their time to read it. Therefore, abstracts should contain keywords and phrases that allow for easy searching. Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, it must do almost as much work as the multi-page paper that follows it.

These are the basic components of an abstract in any discipline:

v Motivation:

Why do we care about the problem and the results? This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.

v Problem statement:

What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)?

v Approach:

How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? What was the extent of your work?

v Results:

What's the answer? As a result of completing the above procedure, what did you learn/invent/create? Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, handwaving results such as "very", "small", or "significant."

v Conclusions:

What are the implications of your answer? Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case? Keep your conclusions reasonable and supportable by the findings of your study.