Abstracts matter more than you think – and writing a good one is hard

Even academics, never mind practitioners, will rarely read beyond an underwhelming and uninformative summary, says Maia Chankseliani

Published on

May 4, 2023

Last updated

May 4, 2023

Maia Chankseliani

Twitter: @MChankseliani

A couple try to cram suitcases into a small car, symbolising abstracts

Source: iStock

Read more about

Read more about:

Academic publishing

Register to continue

Why register?

Registration is free and only takes a moment
Once registered, you can read 3 articles a month
Sign up for our newsletter

Subscribe

Or subscribe for unlimited access to:

Unlimited access to news, views, insights & reviews
Digital editions
Digital access to THE’s university and college rankings analysis

Please or to read this article.

Related articles

Elephant in a phonebox

Career advice: how to write the perfect abstract

Summarising your journal paper effectively helps to ensure that it reaches the right audience

By James Hartley

6 April

Doctoral writing classes work, randomised trial finds

First randomised controlled trials of doctoral writing classes find major improvements in researcher confidence and study habits

10 March

Giant letters scattered and stacked up along a building to illustrate Sloppy writing, sloppy science

Sloppy writing is not a sign of sloppy science

Accurate reporting of results is important, but meaning is rarely distorted by orthographic or grammatical slips, says Adrian Furnham

By Adrian Furnham

2 February

Boy standing on his head

Scientific abstracts ‘getting harder to read’

Analysis of more than 700,000 biomedical texts reveals growing use of jargon

31 March

Sponsored