Active Vocabulary

1. aptly – an apt remark, description, or choice is especially suitable.

2. in lieu of – if you do, get, or give one thing in lieu of another, you do, get, or give it instead of something else, because the two things are considered to have the same value or importance.

3. toll – a small sum of money that you have to pay.

4. to convey – to convey information or feelings means to cause them to be known or understood by someone

5. diversity – the diversity of something is the fact that it contains many different elements.

6. subject matter – the subject matter of something such as a book, lecture, or painting is the thing that is being written about, discussed, or shown.

7. overview – an overview of a situation is a general understanding or description of it as a whole.

8. to sift through – if you sift through something such as evidence, you examine it thoroughly.

9. copious – a copious  amount of something is a large amount of it. 

10. relevant – the relevant thing of a particular kind is the one that is appropriate.

11. to surmise – if you surmise that something is true, you guess it from the available evidence, although you do not know for certain.

12. take-home message – the main message or piece of information that you learn from something.

Scientific literature takes widespread advantage of the abstract as the abbreviated style of choice in order to aptly communicate complex research. In science, an abstract may act as a stand-alone entity in lieu of the paper as well. As thus, an abstract is used by many organizations as the basis for selecting research that is proposed for presentation in the form of a poster, podium/lecture, or workstation presentation. Most literature database search engines index abstracts only as opposed to providing the entire text of the paper. Full-texts of scientific papers must often be purchased because of copyright and/or publisher fees, and therefore the abstract is a significant selling point for the reprint or electronic version of the full-text.

Abstracts are not public domain or open-source unless stated by the publisher. Therefore, abstracts are afforded protections under copyright law in many states just as other form of written speech is protected. However, publishers of scientific articles invariably make abstracts publicly available, even when the article itself is protected by a toll barrier.

The abstract can convey the main results and conclusions of a scientific article but the full text article must be consulted for detail of the methodology, the full experimental results, and a critical discussion of the interpretations and conclusions. Consulting the abstract alone is inadequate for scholarship and may lead to inappropriate medical decisions.

Abstract length varies by discipline and publisher requirements. An abstract is generally between 100 and 250 words. Some are, however, longer than 250 words and some are shorter than 100 words. Seven factors affect the length of an abstract.

1. The length of the document

2. The complexity of the subject matter

3. The diversity of the subject matter

4. The importance of the item to the organization preparing the abstract

5. The accessibility of the subject matter. If the item is a rare material and is not easily accessible, the abstract tends to be longer.

6. Cost of abstracting

7. Purpose

An abstract may or may not have the section title of "abstract" explicitly listed as an antecedent to content, however, they are typically sectioned logically as an overview of what appears in the paper (e.g. any one of the following: Background, Introduction, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusions).

In journal articles, research papers, published patent applications and patents, an abstract is a short summary placed prior to the introduction, often set apart from the body of the text, sometimes with different line justification (as a block or pull quote) from the rest of the article.

An abstract allows one to sift through copious amounts of papers for ones in which the researcher can have more confidence that they will be relevant to his research. Abstracts help one decide which papers might be relevant to his or her own research. Once papers are chosen based on the abstract, they must be read carefully to be evaluated for relevance. It is commonly surmised that one must not base reference citations on the abstract alone, but the entire merits of a paper.