Writing a great abstract: tips from an Editor

Ruffell, Daniela

doi:10.1002/1873-3468.13304

Cited by 11 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 0 publications

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“…A well-written abstract represents a more clearly focused study, as well as the experience of the researchers (2). Despite its critical importance, the power and the role of abstracts on the pre-and post-publication success of papers are generally overlooked and they are usually written prematurely at submission time (10,11). A badly-written and poor-quality abstract will confuse or turn off the potential readers and may also lead database indexers to make in-dexing errors or omissions (11).…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An abstract may critically affect both pre-and postpublication processes of the paper (11). Journal editors always read the abstract before going through the paper to get an initial impression of the work; moreover, reviewers' decision on whether they should review a paper or not is almost entirely based on the abstract (10,11). Although a bad abstract may not by own lead to the rejection of a paper, it does, nevertheless, pave the way for a negative response of the editor (11).…”

Section: The Function Of the Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The selection of presentations in scientific meetings is based on abstracts (4) and the main function of a meeting abstract is, therefore, to showcase the author's valuable contribution and to highlight the work for attracting audiences (10,17). Writing a meeting abstract needs to follow Int J Endocrinol Metab.…”

Section: Abstract For a Scientific Meetingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is suggested that keywords be different from the words that are within the main title; however, they can be variants of the terms/phrases that are used in the title, the abstract, and the main text (40). Effective keywords are those that are familiar within the field and are specific to the paper (i.e., terms used more than twice in the text) (10). Listing very general terms as keywords is not recommended (e.g., protein or DNA) because they are not helpful (10).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Effective keywords are those that are familiar within the field and are specific to the paper (i.e., terms used more than twice in the text) (10). Listing very general terms as keywords is not recommended (e.g., protein or DNA) because they are not helpful (10). A practical guide to choosing effective keywords is to list the main related keywords and then, doing a search using the same words to verify whether they are effective in retrieving appropriate papers within the field of interest (10).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Principles of Biomedical Scientific Writing: Abstract and Keywords

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An abstract is a self-contained, short, powerful statement that describes a larger body of work. It may be incorporated as part of a published paper, book, grant proposal, thesis, research report, or a conference paper. An abstract of a scientific paper will be published online independently, so it should make sense when it is read alone. An abstract of a hypothesis-testing paper consists of at least four key elements, as follows: (1) study question/hypothesis/aim, (2) experiments/material and methods, (3) results, and (4) response to the question/conclusion(s). The abstract usually begins with a background and may end in applications, recommendations, implications, or speculations. The abstract is one of the many features of a manuscript that competes for the readers' attention; therefore, it should be informative, accurate, attractive, and concise. Since a huge amount of work must be compressed into a few sentences, writing an abstract may be a difficult task that needs professional skills. Here, we provide a practical guide to writing an abstract and selecting keywords for a hypothesis-testing medical paper.

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