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En 121 Abstract Lecture Notes

An abstract is a concise summary of a longer document that highlights its purpose, scope, methods, and key findings. Abstracts are published separately from documents to help researchers quickly find relevant information. Descriptive abstracts summarize the document's purpose and methods, while informative abstracts also include results and conclusions. When writing an abstract, it is important to follow a checklist that motivates the work, states the problem, describes the approach, provides results, and outlines conclusions. An effective abstract must be self-contained and meet any word count limits.

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13 views

En 121 Abstract Lecture Notes

An abstract is a concise summary of a longer document that highlights its purpose, scope, methods, and key findings. Abstracts are published separately from documents to help researchers quickly find relevant information. Descriptive abstracts summarize the document's purpose and methods, while informative abstracts also include results and conclusions. When writing an abstract, it is important to follow a checklist that motivates the work, states the problem, describes the approach, provides results, and outlines conclusions. An effective abstract must be self-contained and meet any word count limits.

Uploaded by

Mhea
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is an Abstract?

What is an Abstract?

An abstract is a concise, very short (often less than a page) summary of a longer piece of work
(a journal article, a formal report, etc.). It touches on the major points of the work, and
addresses the purpose, scope, and methods used to arrive at reported findings, and must
accurately describe the longer piece of work.

Abstracts (independent of the documents for which they were written) are often published in
bound and/or computer-retrievable periodical indexes, such as the American Statistics Index.
These indexes help researchers "abstract" information from specific fields of study, and enable
the researchers to review a larger body of information quickly. Abstracts usually contain all the
important terms that researchers might need in order to index the original document by
subject.

Abstracts may also be descriptive or informative, depending on their scope:

 A descriptive abstract (25-250 words) summarizes information about purpose, scope,


and methods used to arrive at findings; it may be like a table of contents of the longer
work in sentence form. Descriptive abstracts are crucial for progress reports and
documents that compile information.

 An informative abstract is an expanded version of the descriptive abstract; it includes


results, conclusions, and recommendations from the original research. An informative
abstract also retains the tone and scope of the original work, and may be as lengthy as
up to 10% of the original document size (though clearly it must omit background and a
great deal of detail). Informative abstracts satisfy the widest possible researcher
indexing needs.

How to Write an Abstract


It is vital to write a complete, but concise description of your work. Abstracts have always
served the function of "selling" your work and convinces the reader to keep reading the rest of
the attached paper.

Writers should follow a checklist consisting of: motivation, problem statement, approach,
results, and conclusions. Following this checklist should increase the chance of people taking
the time to obtain and read your complete paper.

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Checklist: Parts of an Abstract
Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, it must do almost as much work as the multi-
page paper that follows it. In most papers the abstract should in most cases include the
following sections. Each section is typically a single sentence, although there is room for
creativity. In particular, the parts may be merged or spread among a set of sentences. Use the
following as a checklist for your next abstract:

•Motivation:

Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn't obviously "interesting"
it might be better to put motivation first; but if your work is incremental progress on a problem
that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement
first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section
should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might
have if successful.

•Problem statement:

What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized
approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too much jargon. In some cases it is
appropriate to put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only works if
most readers already understand why the problem is important.

•Approach:

How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation,
analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What
was the extent of your work (did you look at one application program or a hundred programs in
twenty different programming languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or
measure?

•Results:

What's the answer? Specifically, most good computer architecture papers conclude that
something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or otherwise better than something
else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, hand-waving results such as "very", "small",
or "significant." If you must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk
about orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should not
provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand you don't have room
for all the caveats.

•Conclusions:

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What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a
significant "win", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a
waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially
generalizable, or specific to a particular case?

Other Considerations

An abstract must be a fully self-contained, capsule description of the paper. It can't assume (or
attempt to provoke) the reader into flipping through looking for an explanation of what is
meant by some vague statement. It must make sense all by itself. Some points to consider
include:

•Meet the word count limitation. An abstract word limit of 150 to 300 words is common.

•Any major restrictions or limitations on the results should be stated, if only by using words
such as: "might", "could", "may", and "seem".

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