By Ahmad Jamil Malik
An abstract is a short and concise summary of a research paper or a dissertation typically of 300 words or less. It is a necessary component of any research you’re submitting to a conference and as a manuscript for a peer reviewed journal. The purpose of an abstract is to: inform the readers about the contents of your articles, help readers determine the relevance of your research with their own and provide an overview of the full research paper.
There are three types of abstracts, namely: Informative, Descriptive and Critical. Informative abstract summarizes and provides an overview of full research paper in a single page or paragraph. Descriptive abstract explains the purpose, goal and methods in 100-200 words. It does not include results and conclusions drawn. In Critical abstract, writer’s own research is evaluated and compared to similar work done by others.
Following is a summary of preparing a medical research abstract for publication:
- Choose the journal, conference or the meeting where you want to publish your article. Find the instructions for authors on their website and read the formatting requirements.
- Choose the specialty in which you want to write the abstract, be specific in it, for example, "Acute myocardial infarction after laboratory-confirmed influenza infection.”
- You should know the deadline for submission of the abstract.
- You should know the “maximum word count” as required for the abstract.
- Choose the “type of submission” you want to submit in that journal. It can be an Oral presentation, Pitch presentation or an Electronic poster submission/E-exhibit.
The basic structure of an abstract comprises of introduction-body-conclusion structure in which parts of the paper are discussed in the order: purpose, problem/objective, materials and methods, results and conclusion.
You can structure your abstract by answering the following questions in each sub-heading:
- Purpose and Motivation: Why is this study important to your field or a lay reader?
- Problem: What is your research trying to better understand or what problem is it trying to solve?
- Materials and Methods: Detail your research-methods/type of research variables, word count etc.
- Results: What did your study yield in concrete form?
- Conclusion: What are the effects of these results on my field or the wider world?
A good abstract is the one that is understandable to the reader on its own. It also does not add anything extra to the research article, as it summarises it.
However, often an abstract is rejected from publications. Some reasons for the rejection of your abstract can be: that your research topic is not novel or specific; rather it is a very general topic. Not following the guidelines in terms of structure, headings, images, captions, tables etc. can be a reason for rejection as well. Another reason can be wrong English with punctuation or grammatical errors. Abstract not specific to the society will also be rejected for example, submitting a neurology abstract in European Society of Cardiology (ESC) will be rejected. If you’re doing a highly specialized research, pick a very specific meeting to present it in, for example, Society of Interventional Oncology.
In the end, the key to master any skill is practice, and abstract writing is a skill that can be developed by the same key. Reading a variety of published abstracts by different authors, writing your own, learning from criticism- all this will first hand teach you the art of abstract writing. This way, you can too, put forward abstracts that are efficient, concise and a source of knowledge for others.