Research

By Clifford Hawkins, Marco Sorgi, Stephen Lock. 1985

Although the abstract appears first in the article, it is best written last because it must contain the essence of the introduction (the purpose of the study), the methods, the main findings (with specific results and their statistical significance) and main conclusions. The style can be impersonal and condensed. It is not an introduction to the article and is not intended to be read as part of the article. It should not contain material that is not in the article. There is much confusion about the nature and function of abstracts, summaries and synopses. A summary was once the summing up of the message at the end of an article. Then editors put it first so readers could see if they wished to read the whole article. Then it began to be used by abstracting journals so more care had to be given to its contents. It is now best called an abstract although some journals still call it a summary. A synopsis, on the other hand, is a brief note of the contents of the article, usually prepared by the journal editor rather than the author. Synopses are seldom used. In the Vancouver style the abstract is limited to 150 words and indeed some computers are programmed to accept only 150 words subsequent words are just omitted.

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Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Spirituality and Quality of Life (2005, background): “For example, qualitative studies on spirituality have focused on identifying defining attributes and conceptualizations of spirituality in relation to individually and culturally defined experiences of health and illness (Burkhardt, 1993; Chiu, 2000; Martinez, 1999; McGrath, 1997; Potts, 1996; Rehm,”
A review of uncertainty analysis in building energy assessment (2018, unknown): “The Bayesian calibration method was demonstrated to substantially reduce uncertainty in posterior distributions that correspond well to true values under three levels of uncertainty consistent with different audit levels [4].”
Identifiability of Path-Specific Effects (2005, methodology): “The satisfaction of counterfactual formulas by causal models is defined in the standard way, which we reproduce from [Halpern, 2000].”
High temperature ultrasonic transducers: review (2008, background): “But there should be no illusions about the speed with which this new scientific knowledge is likely to be commercialized [14].”
Review on Wearable Technology Sensors Used in Consumer Sport Applications (2019, methodology): “This is a way of using observational methods for monitoring injury patterns.”
Differential Evolution: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art (2011, background): “In [3], a ﬁtness-based adaptation has been proposed for F .”