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.
