Writing Effective Abstracts

What is it about?

What is an elevator talk, and what does it have to do with writing a paper? A lot. Imagine you are the president of the nonprofit Light Is The Solution Foundation. The board of directors is meeting at the New York Hilton, and you are waiting to ride the elevator from the 31st floor to the lobby. The doors open, and you suddenly find yourself standing with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic Gates’ Foundation is meeting at the same hotel. Gates notices the logo on your shirt of a small child reading a book by the light of a lantern and asks you, “What is that? What do you do?” Indeed, what do you do now? You have 30 floors, or about 1 minute, to get your message across. So you explain that normal living activities cease in many countries in the world after the sun goes down. Children have no light to read textbooks, mothers no light to cook, fathers no light to earn income. With this background, you then explain that the Light Is The Solution Foundation has addressed this problem by developing rechargeable lanterns that are low-cost, have a battery life of 30 hours, and put out light equivalent to three 60-W bulbs. You have given away 4500 lanterns in one country and have results showing that more children now share books, study together, and graduate at a higher rate. In fact, average incomes have risen by 20% for families who have received a lantern. You have concluded that this unique program could be expanded to any country that has even the crudest electrical grid or generators for recharging the lanterns. This is the elevator talk. Your 1-minute opportunity to summarize what you do, how you do it, the results you produce, and the impact you make. A well-developed elevator talk entices the listener to want to learn more. In many professions, entire careers are made and lost as a result of elevator talks. The elevator talk and the abstract of a scientific paper have a lot in common. Although written rather than spoken, the abstract also provides a summary of the important information an author wants to convey to the reader, with the goal of enticing the reader to want to learn more. Instead of a limitation on the amount of time, the author has a limitation on the number of words. The challenge is to make the most effective use of these words. Here I provide you with some basic information about the abstract and highlight the characteristics of a well-written abstract.

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Why is it important?

The abstract is the first thing that editors and reviewers lok at when deciding on the fate of a submited paper. A well-writen abstract can go a long way in your success in getting a paper accepted, published, AND cited.