English Academic Writing (eBook)

1.2 The research story and its parts

An abstract is a compact and self-​contained text – hence our decision to deal with it separately – yet it is obviously twinned with the research story to be developed properly in the paper itself. In fact, it is a miniature version of that story. As a publisher’s website explains: “An abstract is a succinct summary of a larger piece of work that aims to persuade readers to read the full document – essentially, it acts as a shop window, enticing people to step inside.”

Abstracts are a typical, though not universal feature of journal articles (and of submissions to academic conferences). They may not be the most exciting texts to write. Yet Belcher’s (2019: 92-93) list of their key functions – “connecting with editors”, “connecting with peer reviewers”, “getting found”, “getting read” and “getting cited” – indicates clearly why it is worthwhile spending a fair amount of time and effort on getting your abstract right. For the stakes are high. A compelling abstract may sway a journal editor into sending your paper out to review rather than desk-​rejecting it, and a researcher into agreeing to do the review rather than declining. It may also be the abstract that attracts the attention of someone searching the web and encourages them to read the full article. Over and above that, writing an abstract can assist writers as “a diagnostic tool” highlighting problems in their main text. “If you can’t write a brief abstract of your article”, Belcher remarks, “then your article may lack focus” (p. 92). In that case, it will not be the abstract that needs revising but the paper.

Now for some technical details relating to abstracts. First, in journal articles they are placed between the paper’s title and the start of the introduction, so technically in a space that lies outside the paper proper. This special status is significant because, as we will see later, it justifies a different approach to citation. It also means that some repetition is tolerated between the abstract and the body of the paper. Second, abstracts vary in length, depending on the discipline and the publication outlet; in the humanities and social sciences, they typically range from about 150 to 300 words. These limits are set by publishers, editors and conference organisers, so authors usually have no say in the matter. Basically, you do as you’re told. Third, most journals also require you to supply a set of keywords which are typically printed right underneath the abstract or alongside it. Apart from facilitating online searches, keywords also help editors to identify reviewers whose expertise matches the paper’s topic, theory and method. As that fit is essential, authors should choose their keywords wisely.

Given that the function of abstracts is to ‘entice readers to step inside’, it is hardly surprising that the first sentence plays a special role. There are two basic approaches to writing it. One is to resort to what later in this book will be introduced as a metacomment (see 7.1), using phrases such as This paper discusses. The following are typical examples.

The second, and arguably more elegant approach is to formulate a statement that introduces the topic in fairly broad, even non-​technical terms, giving a diverse readership a general idea of what the paper is about. Importantly, such an opening sentence usually avoids tackling controversial points head-​on. Instead, it is more likely to be “a general, relatively uncontentious statement” (Murray & Moore 2006: 59). Extracts 1.4 to 1.6 – all of them from highly specialised scholarly journals – provide fairly typical examples.

A very general first sentence is particularly useful if you cannot be entirely sure who your readers will be. Given the nature of research papers, there is generally little doubt that your audience will primarily consist of other researchers, and often very senior ones, but this does not necessarily mean that they will be specialists in your precise area. And, should they not be, keeping the jargon less than ‘full on’ at the outset will make it easier to entice them in.

As regards structure and content, Swales (1990: 179) puts it in a nutshell. “The essence of the genre”, he explains, “is one of distillation”. The ‘distilling’ results in what is effectively “a fully self-​contained, capsule description of the paper” (Koopman 1997), with the latter’s main sections represented in the abstract. This is well illustrated in Extract 1.7, which is drawn from a paper structured strictly on AIMRaD lines (with its constituent sections numbered 1 to 4 and headed Introduction, Materials and Methods, Findings and Discussion). As is readily apparent from the abstract, these are reflected almost exactly in the sequence of its sentences (in Extracts 1.7 and 1.8, sentence numbers have been added as a basis for Table 1.2 and our discussion of it).