Learn – Research Abstract
The research Abstract is an indispensable part of any research article. An abstract is typically placed in the beginning pages of an article before the Introduction section, and you might wonder why we discuss it here as the final stage of your writing. The reason is simple; you would not be able to write a functional abstract without knowing your findings and their implications first. In this final chapter, we discuss the five important stages in the process of writing an Abstract. To do so, we first help you read and analyze abstracts from your own field to learn more about the conventions of your field by way of comparison. More specifically, we draw your attention to the word choice and grammatical features used in your field to write an Abstract as a way to help you implement your findings from the analysis stage in your own research Abstract. In what follows, we first introduce the purpose of the Abstract and its typical format, as well as the strategies used to write a succinct Abstract for your research.
The Purpose
An Abstract performs several functions:
- it provides a stand-alone synopsis of one’s research that includes short accounts of study topic, methods and findings;
- it helps researchers as a filtering and screening device for when they look for publications in their desired research areas to save their time;
- it may be used as a tool to clarify the structure of the article and help interested readers to better navigate when read the entire article; and
- it can be used as an indexing tool by journals and editors who publish the abstract, along with the associated research (Huscin, 2001; Swales & Feak, 2009).
In the context of publication, an Abstract helps reviewers by giving them a quick overview of your research (Swales & Feak, 2009). It is fair to say that Abstract is the very first section of an article that leaves the first impression on your reader. Therefore, it would be important to familiarize yourself with common Abstract writing conventions in your fields so that you can achieve the desired impression on your audience.
Abstracts might be written in structured or traditional ways. Both ways are in fact structured, but they slightly differ in the way they are formatted. In this chapter, we mainly investigate traditional Abstracts. The traditional Abstract is varied in length as measured by word count. For example, most fields in science demand an abstract that ranges from 150 to 250 words. In humanities fields, such as in Applied Linguistics, the word count might exceed this range, and at times, we see abstracts that are 500 words long.
The Format
As mentioned above, the primary purpose of an Abstract is to provide a summary or a synopsis of your research. To be able to condense your research in a limited space and yet leave the desired impression on your reader, usually a set of communicative goals are achieved in a traditional Abstract. Irrespective of disciplinary differences, most traditional Abstracts briefly describe the current knowledge on the topic of the research, the importance of that topic, the specific focus of the current research, an account of how the research was carried out, the discoveries and meaning of those discoveries for the audience. You might wonder how all or majority of these communicative goals can be achieved in a limited space. Indeed, a source of struggle in writing Abstracts originates from the same space and structuring issue. All these goals mimic the formatting of an entire article, but in a very small space. In the continuation of this chapter, we provide you with the set of goals to be achieved in an Abstract and offer you strategies and language samples that can be used to communicate those goals. We also present a sample analysis of the Abstracts in your fields as the primary way to learn about what language to use and how to structure concise sentences.
