Advice for writing abstracts from the FASEB J
Heather Etchevers
Friday, 01 August 2008 12:26 UTC
This article is light, funny, goes down well and contains plenty of good advice. One is to be pithy, so I’ll let you get on with reading it. I believe it is publicly accessible in full length.
Writing Science: The Abstract is Poetry, the Paper is Prose. By Gerald Weissmann, Editor-in-Chief.
The FASEB Journal. 2008;22:2601-2604.
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Replies
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I liked this:-
There was an Old Person of Cromer,
Who stood on one leg to read Homer;
When he found he grew stiff,
He jumped over the cliff,
Which concluded that Person of Cromer. -
Yup, I immediatelly noticed that limerick. Was that man someone Henry knows?
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Hi Bora,
You mean “Was that man someone Henry knew?” surely.
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Interesting advice to use the limerick and not the sonnet as poetic model for science writing…
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The author makes an interesting point that controls need to be explicitly enumerated in the abstract. While I think that would be a great tool for making the conclusions in the abstract sound more solid, I think it is near impossible to do while maintaining the 250 word limit. I had enough trouble squeezing in the background and conclusions, nevermind the methods and controls. So should abstracts be longer? Although that would seem to defeat the purpose of an abstract, or short summary… In other words, while I appreciate the benefits of including controls in abstracts, I just don’t see how it can be done in the current publication format.
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Bora said that well in a recent post. That the abstract should provoke you to read the rest of the paper in order to see if the exorbitant claim made in [it] is actually supported by data.
I think some controls are conducive to being mentioned. For instance, when you have a missense mutation that is not found in e.g. 300 control chromosomes (to support its novelty and potential functional link to the disease). You’ll read that from time to time in an abstract. But overall, the wish is a little unrealistic.
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I am a fan of the structured abstract and we have discussed it before. In that format a lot of information is contained in the abstract, including the experimental design with controls.
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