Five Elements to Include in Your Abstract

An abstract is usually about a page long and should give the whole picture of your research in terms of the literature review, methodology, results and conclusion. Readers user the abstract to quickly find out what your research is about. A well written abstract is critical to pull in readers so that they can open up and read your work. The five main elements to include in your abstract are stated below.

Introduction

This is the first part of the abstract, and should be brief and attractive to the reader at the same time. After reading a well written intro, the reader would be eager to read more.

Research significance

This usually answers the question: Why did you do this research?

Methodology

This usually answers the questions: What did you do? How did you do it?

Results

This answers the question: What did you find out after doing the research? Or what are the advantages of your method based on the results?

Conclusion

This usually answers the question: What do your findings mean? What have you contributed?

Read the abstract carefully and try to eliminate any sentence that doesn’t fit into any of the categories above. Make sure all of your sentences contribute to explain the whole picture.