It’s also worth remembering that search engines and bibliographic databases use abstracts.

As well as the title, to identify key terms for indexing your publish paper. So what you include in your abstract and in your title are crucial for helping other researchers find your paper or article.

If you are writing an abstract for a course paper. Your professor may give you specific guidelines for what to include and how to organize your abstract. Similarly, academic journals often have specific requirements for abstracts. So in addition to following the advice on this page. You should be sure to look for and follow any guidelines from the course or journal you’re writing for.

Abstracts contain most of the following kinds of information in brief form.

The body of your paper will, of course, develop and explain these ideas much more fully. As you will see in the samples below, the proportion of your abstract that you devote to each kind of information.

And in some cases, some of this information is implied, rather than stated explicitly. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which is widely use. The social sciences, gives specific guidelines for what to include in the abstract for different kinds of papers—for empirical studies. Literature reviews or meta-analyses, theoretical papers, methodological papers, and case studies.

Here are the typical kinds of information found in most abstact

Your abstract should be intelligible on its own, without a reader’s having to read your entire paper. And in an abstract, you usually do not cite references—most of your abstract will describe. What you have study in your research and what you have find and what you argue in your paper. In the body of your paper, you will cite the specific literature that informs your research.