Did you know that being able to write an abstract in academic writing is one of the most important skills that you must develop to advance your career? Why? Well, as academics we do need to write an abstract for a conference presentation, scientific papers, dissertations, research proposals. The abstract, therefore, plays a crucial part in our research projects – it provides the reader with a summary of our work and encourages them to read the whole paper or listen to the entire presentation.
Today I want to talk about the key steps in writing an abstract section of a research paper. Some time ago, I already shared an article about writing an abstract for your study. Since then, I’ve reflected on the discussions I had with the participants of our paper writing mastermind and decided to provide more insights and tips on how to write an abstract. I will also explain my approach to writing abstracts based on the actual journal abstract example.
Table of Contents
What is a role of an abstract and how to write a good abstract for a research paper?
How to write a good abstract for a research paper? It’s quite a broad topic! But you may wonder why we should talk about it if it’s just 100-300 words of your research paper, proposal, or a conference paper?
You may be surprised to hear this but an informative abstract is one of the most important elements of your research paper! Why? Well, in my opinion, it’s important to write a great abstract as it’s a summary of your study that other researchers can read to understand what you did.
However, squeezing all of your fantastic research in about 100-300 words it’s quite challenging. Answering your question how long is an abstract – yes, it’s usually below 300 words, but it can be as low as 100 words. Make sure you check the length specification in the author guidelines for the scientific journal that you want to submit your research paper to.
Writing an abstract for a research paper is, therefore, not an easy task. You have to distil the most important messages, methods and results from your research. No, it shouldn’t be an essay. Instead, your abstract should present a very direct message to someone who reads your work so that they can easily understand why you did perform this study, what exactly you did and what method you used and what’s the implication. Therefore, your abstract needs to answer the main questions of your readers – I’m going to refer to them in the latter part of this article.
The main aim of an abstract is to encourage others to read the full paper or accept your paper for a conference or publication. It helps them understand the key messages in your paper better!
This understanding this helped me to learn how to write a good abstract for a research paper early in my research career – I’d like to believe that writing a good abstract for research paper can increase visibility of your research and will encourage other researchers to use your work in their research.
How to write an abstract of a paper – what is the abstract content?
What to write in an abstract is one of the first questions that my students ask me, regardless of whether we talk about writing their thesis or research paper. So what should be the content of abstract in research papers? Let me answer this question with…more questions!
Ask yourself what it is that you look for abstracts when you do a literature review for your project. For example, when I read papers or look for papers to support my literature review, I search for the following pieces of information and ask myself the following questions.
When I look for a specific piece of information, I first try to determine whether the research paper that I read can potentially give me this specific piece of information. I usually try to understand whether that specific research is relevant to my work or whether I can use some of the methods, results or discussion in this specific paper to support my work. I usually get this information from reading abstracts!
When reading the abstract of your research paper, other researchers will be asking the following questions:
- “Is this research relevant to my work?
- “How can I use [methods/results/discussion] from this paper in my work?”
- “What new findings and implications does this research paper present?”
Reflect on what you do when you search for information. When you read papers, try to understand what information you are looking for. Others are likely looking for similar pieces of information. And this is another key to writing a good abstract for research paper. By reflecting on your journey, you can understand how you should write and what kind of information you should include in the abstracts.
Therefore, when you read the next abstract, I encourage you to write down the questions that come to your mind when you read the abstract. You can use them later when you write your abstract for your research. You’ll be able to use those questions to guide you and indicate what’s important and what kind of answers you should provide to the readers.
By doing so, you will create an abstract template for research paper and will know exactly what should be the content of abstract in research paper. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, check out my Paper Writing Masterclass where I explain how to write an abstract for a scientific paper in a step-by-step approach.
How to write an abstract – how to structure your abstract?
Regardless of whether you’re writing an abstract for a conference publication, dissertation or publication in an academic journal, there are some generic style guidelines that you should consider. I have learnt this early in my PhD degree and I believe that everyone should be taught this! Here I will give you an example of abstract in research paper that I’m most proud of.
But before I’ll talk about this article abstract example, I want to share the generic structure of the abstract. In principle, in each abstract, we distinguish five key elements.
Your research abstract would begin with the background and context. It’ll help your reader understand the wider research area and why did you do your study. In that element, you need to tell your reader why your research is important, why it’s relevant and why it’s timely.
Using the example of abstract in research paper I mentioned earlier, my work focuses on carbon capture. Therefore, I usually begin writing my abstracts by including a sentence or two about climate change, global warming or the energy sector. In that part of my abstract, I want to provide my readers with the relevant background. After you introduce the reader to your research area, you can narrow down the content of abstract in research paper to the specific technology, concept, issues of your particular research area.
Once you established the context and specific challenges in your research area, you need to establish the research challenge. You have to clearly articulate the research challenge you set out to address in your research.
For example, in my research on carbon capture, the main challenge is that this technology isn’t (yet) economically viable. Therefore, we need to find a way to make it less expensive and easier for the industry to implement.
Once you set out the challenge you’ll address in your research paper, you must present your proposed solution. You have to clearly present what your paper does. That’s why you have to clearly say that “in this paper, you evaluate [your proposed solution to a specific research problem].
Then you present your methods, key results and discussion. In terms of methods, if your space is really limited, for example, in the case of short abstracts (<150 words), you may not actually include any description of the method you used in your work, or you may include a very brief mention of it.
This is because the results, discussion and implications of your work are the most important aspects you need to include in your abstract. This is because you want to encourage people to read the full paper and inspire them to use your results to support their work.
So how to write an abstract? Let’s look at my journal article abstract example!
When writing this article, I thought it might be actually more useful to explain how to write an abstract using a sample abstract that I wrote for one of my journal papers. As I mentioned above, I decided to use the paper that I’m most proud of so far, as it was published in Energy and Environmental Science.
Here I want to show you what I actually did in this research abstract actually to encourage people to read it.
TECHNICAL CONTENT ALERT!!! I know that the abstract writing example presented below include a high level of technical content – would you like me to analyse research abstracts in other research areas? Let me know in the comment!
General background
“Implementation of carbon capture and storage, nuclear power stations and wide utilisation of renewable energy sources have been identified as capable of reducing around 42% of the energy sector’s cumulative CO2 emissions between 2009 and 2050.”
You can see that I started writing my abstract with a general background. It actually includes a high-level context for my research where I mentioned that we have to decarbonise the energy sector to achieve emission reduction targets. This gives the reader an idea of whether this paper is relevant to their research area and helps them decide whether to continue reading the abstract.
Specific background
“In scenarios assuming high shares of renewable energy sources in the energy portfolio, energy storage technologies and the remaining power generating assets would be required to flexibly balance energy supply and demand.”
Then, I narrowed my research abstract down to a specific background. This part indicates that we have renewables,w carbon capture, and energy storage. Then, there is a challenge involved because remaining power generation assets like carbon capture need to balance the energy demand.
Research challenge
“With nuclear power plants operating at base load, this task would be handled by flexible fossil fuel power plants with CO2 capture. However, mature CO2 capture systems were shown to impose high-efficiency penalties (8–12.5% points) and are better suited for base-load operation.”
Once I established the background, I defined a research challenge that presents the main issues in this research area. In this specific case, if our energy grid comprises a significant amount of renewables. The key characteristic of renewables, such as solar and wind is the fact that their electricity production patterns are rather unpredictable.
As a result, we do need to have a capacity to balance energy supply and demand in the energy network. There are also other challenges associated with the decarbonisation of the energy grid, such as the fact that carbon capture imposes high-efficiency penalties, is expensive and better suited to operate at base load. That was the challenge I attempted to answer in this paper.
Proposed solution
“An emerging calcium looping process, which has also been considered for energy storage, has been found to offer lower efficiency penalties (5–8% points). This study presents a concept of the calcium looping process with inherent energy storage for decarbonisation of the coal-fired power plant.”
My proposed solution was to combine two different research areas where carbon capture was used for simultaneous carbon capture and energy storage. This was because these individual applications of the process I considered were explored but weren’t combined before. That was the main novelty of this work!
In general, after you present your proposed solution, you will (briefly) describe what methods you used in your research. But because I was restricted with the word limit, I decided not to mention this explicitly. I just decided to mention that I did some thermodynamics analysis that is implied from the results and then economic evaluation as well, again methods implied from the results.
Results and discussion of implications
“Analysis has revealed that the possible routes for energy storage in this process include CaO/CaCO3 solids storage, CaO/Ca(OH)2 solids storage and cryogenic O2 storage systems.
Comparison of the CaO/CaCO3 storage and cryogenic O2 storage systems revealed that implementation of the latter would result in higher turndown of the entire system and would offer higher energy density. Also, the hydration reaction was found to improve the energy density of the CaO/CaCO3 energy storage system by 57.4%, from 307.2 kWh/m3 to 483.6 kWh/m3.
Economic evaluation of the proposed concepts revealed that application of the cryogenic O2 storage system in the calcium looping CO2 capture process has the potential to increase the profitability of the integrated system, even over the reference coal-fired power plant without CO2 capture.”
The last part presented the key results, discussion and implications of your research. It shouldn’t present all the results, just the ones that support the main message of your work. You also include just the main conclusion and main implication.
So, in this case, I presented why energy storage using a calcium oxide system is beneficial compared to other systems. The main implication of that work was the if we combine carbon capture and energy storage, we can not only make carbon capture more feasible, it can actually be better than the system without carbon capture. That was the main message I wanted other academics and industrial partners to take away from my work and then, hopefully, read the full paper and cite it in their work.
Let me know in the comments if this worked example was useful and if you want more of them here!
Even though your paper may not be open access, your research abstract is. Therefore, when writing your abstract make sure your readers get as much value from your abstract as possible!
When do you write an abstract for the research article?
You may be surprised, but this is quite a common question I receive from my students. Considering the abstract format for research paper I shared above, there are two approaches that you can take to write your abstract.
The first approach assumes that you write an abstract before you write the full paper. How to write an abstract before the paper you may wonder. You won’t write the full abstract at this point. You will develop a skeleton of the abstract first. As a result, you can use your abstract as a framework for your full research paper. Although I write my abstracts only after I completed a draft of my research paper, I can see the value it can bring to your writing. Namely, such a draft abstract can help you derive the messages that you should include in your full article and will help you maintain focus.
Another way is the way that I usually follow. Namely, you would write an abstract after you wrote the full research article. Leaving this activity to the end of your writing process has its benefits. Why? When I wrote the main body of the manuscript, I can reflect on what I’ve actually written. It allows me to distil the key messages I want to include in the abstract.
I’ve shared this approach with the participants of my mastermind that we recently offered as a bonus for those who sign up for our paper writing training. Here is what one of the participants said:
The sessions were handled by Dr. Dawid Hanak who explained the tips for developing a novelty statement that creates originality of a research paper.
He gave valid insights why the Abstract of any paper should be taken seriously; it is the ‘mirror of the paper’. The fear and anxiety of how to raise the title of paper was addressed as the various tips and ideas of doing it seamlessly were thoroughly identified and discussed in the sessions.
Iyenoma Osazee, Paper Writing Masterclass cohort 2021
But what if you actually write the abstract at the end and activity this will generate new ideas for content you could include in your paper? What to do then? When you write the abstract after you finalize your manuscript, then it’s likely that you see some additional pieces of work that you could in your research.
It’s actually a good idea to think whether you should change the paper itself or whether you actually want to fix the content of the paper, submit it for a conference or to a journal, and then think about how you can expand on your new idea to actually produce an additional piece of work for your research.
This will, of course, depend on the “size” of the idea. If it’s a small idea that requires little additional work and modifications to your paper, it could be a good idea to include it in your scientific paper. But if this new idea requires a significant amount of work that will take you weeks or months to complete will be a better use of your time to write a new research paper. Remember, each research paper should have a razor-sharp focus on a single research question.]
How to write an abstract of a research paper?
Once you’ve written the paper, how do you actually get down to writing the research abstract? How do you know what information to include and what data to exclude from your research paper? In other words, how do you write an abstract in practical steps?
The approach I use is as simple. If I want to write a good abstract for a research paper, I leave the manuscript for a couple of days before I start writing an abstract. Why? Having just written the full text, you will be very familiar with the concepts and messages presented in your paper. Consequently, you may not notice anything exceptional about it. This is because you may think that everyone will understand it in the way you understand it.
But if you leave it for a couple of days, you’ll be able to clearly see the main messages that come out of your research paper. Write down these main messages, and support them with the main results that are the most fascinating and that you think others will find most exciting. Use these messages to develop the structure for your abstract!
I also encourage you to ask someone else to actually read your paper before submitting it to a journal or for a conference to verify whether your messages come across as you intended.
Conclusions
The abstract (and title) will likely be the most often read sections of your research paper. This is mostly because abstract isn’t hidden behind paywalls and is easily accessible. Therefore, it’s important to make your abstract as exciting as possible to encourage other researchers to read your work and use it in their research. I do believe after reading this article, writing a good abstract for research paper should be a much easier task! If you would like to learn more about writing abstracts and research papers, check out our Paper Writing Masterclass!
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