Hey there!
Today, I will tell you about sections of an abstract.
First we will talk about what content should be in each section, and if you watch until
the end we will do a short section identification activity together.
Here at Uni-edit, we are experts in abstract editing and writing and we provide professional
English language services to people around the world.
so utilize today’s information if you want your abstract to be rock solid.
This content was taken from a full lecture video which you can watch at the link right
here or in this video’s description.
Enjoy!
Here are the main sections of a research article.
Motivation: What is the importance of the research?
Why would a reader be interested in the larger work?
Problem: What problem does this work attempt to solve?
What is the scope of the project?
What is the main argument, thesis or claim?
Methodology: Specific models or approaches used or the types of evidence used in the
research.
Results: Specific data that indicates the results of the project.
Discussion: Interpret the results to reach the main conclusions.
How does this work add to the body of knowledge?
Practical or theoretical applications from your findings or implications for future research?
And your conclusion is a short summary.
These are the sections of most papers you will write, but they are also the sections
of your abstract.
Now let’s talk about each of these sections more specifically.
Alright structure of an abstract.
motivation section.Why do we care about the problem and the results?
Why is it interesting?
What's the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have
if successful.
Reason for conducting the research.
Never lose sight of why the research was conducted.
This is important because you will obviously know why your research is important, but you
also need to be able to communicate that to the readers in your abstract.
Structure of an abstract, problem statement: What problem are you trying to solve?
What is the scope of your work?
Is it a generalized approach, or for a specific situation?
Be careful not to use too much jargon.
For some cases, put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only
works if most readers already understand why the problem is important.
Structure of an abstract.
Methodology, also called the 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?
What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure?
Structure of an abstract, results.
What’s the answer to your research question?
Did your study find it was faster?
More efficient?
Safer?
Cheaper?
More reliable?
Here is where you will use the main numerical results.
Avoid vagueness such as: "very", "small", or "significant"
Some abstracts may discuss the findings in a more general way.
Structure of an abstract.
Now finally the discussion section.
What are the implications of your answer?
Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant "win", be a nice hack?
Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case? and
Ramifications.
What changes should be implemented as a result of the findings of the work?
How does this work add to the body of knowledge on the topic?
Now for an exercise.
We will take a look at an abstract.
See if you can Identify these in the abstract.
Structure: Motivation, Problem statement, Scope of Study, Method, Results, Discussion,
Implications, Recommendations, Conclusion Language: Concise?
Authoritative?
Specific?
Searchable phrases?
Does it have just enough quantitative results?
Is it fully self-contained?
Does it make sense all by itself?
Is it free of jargon and abbreviations?
Ok let’s look for these in our next slide.
Here is the well-written abstract example.
I will read all of this out loud, but feel free to pause the video to read it at your
own pace.
Do your best to identify the parts of the abstract we just mentioned as I read it.
Ok.
Title: A chatbot system to support mine safety procedures
Abstract: This study developed a chatbot to improve the efficiency of government activation
of mine safety procedures during natural disasters.
Taiwan has a comprehensive governmental system dedicated to responding to frequent natural
disasters, and the Bureau of Mines has instituted clear procedures to ensure the delivery of
disaster alarms and damage reports.
However, the labor- and time-consumption procedures are inefficient.
In this study, we propose a system framework for disaster-related information retrieval
and immediate notifications to support the execution of mine safety procedures.
The framework utilizes instant messaging (IM) applications as the user interface to look
up information and send messages to announce the occurrence of disaster events.
We evaluated the efficiency of the procedures before and after adopting the system and achieved
a time-cost reduction of 55.8 minutes among three types of disaster events.
Alright let’s have a look at the parts of this abstract.
So for this abstract, It is only 135 words so it’s on the shorter side and that is
ok.
Our first sentence here is a very clear introduction telling us what the study did.
The second sentence has some history which sets the stage nicely for the problem statement
which comes next.
So this is your problem statement.
Immediately after the problem statement is the method of how this study attempted to
solve the problem.
We then get some more information on their potential solution before just enough quantitative
results.
For searchable phrases maybe we have chatbot, mine safety procedures, natural disasters
as being the most common here.
Lastly this is a clearly self-contained abstract.
We have the history, the problem, the solution and the results.
If I wanted more details on the specifics I could read the paper but this abstract does
a lot of work to give me clear and concise information.
What is missing from this abstract?
A discussion section.
But I took a look at this paper and the discussion was missing!
So there is no problem with this abstract missing a discussion section.
I hope this activity was helpful for you.
You can do this with other abstracts on your own for more practice.
I hope this was useful for you!
Please visit the description below for links to other videos on abstract writing.
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And I’ll see you again soon!