Guía rápida para un abstract claro y publicable (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The abstract is quite possibly the most important section of your entire paper, and is one that I see researchers commonly get wrong. Often, they're trying to write prematurely, packing in the wrong details and too many details, they're not selling the paper well enough to get it sent out for peer review and get highly cited, and they often agonize over it, endlessly writing and rewriting trying to make it perfect. Well, not anymore today, because what I'm going to do is show you exactly how to write a strong abstract using the method that we teach inside our FastTrack mentorship programs. And if you follow these steps, no exaggeration, it'll only take you 15 minutes to go start to finish, to have a winning abstract without all the headache and frustration. If you're new to the channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler, and here we pass on the research and judgment, the knowledge that you're so often left to figure out for yourself is what I wish I would have had as an early stage researcher. And so what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to cover the right mental model for what an abstract actually is and when you should be writing it. We're going to go through each section of the abstract so you know what should be included, what should not, and then I'm going to show you some real examples across fields of what abstracts look like so you can see how our system works in practice and applies to the real world. So first, the right way to think about your abstract is a mini snapshot of your entire paper. Think of it like a highlight reel, and that means a few things. First, it's concise, and concise writing is hard. Hemingway famously said to a friend, I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one. It takes practice, it takes skill, and that gets crystallized in the abstract. Second, it needs to showcase your main findings and study credibility quickly. It needs to emerge so that readers can see it at a glance. Third, it needs to align with your entire paper so that the abstract is perfectly consistent and coherent with what you write in your methods, discussion, and results section. If at this stage something feels vague or confused in the abstract, it's almost always because something is not clear in the paper itself. That's why writing the abstract really serves as such a powerful diagnostic tool for yourself to see that your paper is internally coherent, and also when used by the editors and reviewers to make judgments about its quality and whether it should get published. So when should you write it? Well, we're in Jeckson. Our system, which as many of you who follow my channel know, we follow an inside-out approach to make writing easier and more linear. We go methods, results, discussion, and right after the discussion, but before the introduction gets really finalized, we write the abstract. It brings, it kind of sutures the whole paper together in a nice tidy package, and helps you check for that alignment, for that internal coherence, so that everything makes sense as a complete package to reviewers. And why is this? Well, because by the time you've written the discussion, you already have clarity on the key elements that your abstract is going to need. You're going to know what you found, what matters, what are your main limitations, what your real contribution and conclusion is, and that enables you to write that mini snapshot of the paper and do that highlight reel. And at that point, the abstract really is orienting and helps you to see the whole paper at once. And the abstract, once you have that clear, it's so much easier to go to the final stage and write the harder section, the introduction, because you already know what you're trying to justify and explain, how you're going to kind of wrap your paper together. So if you write the abstract too early, you're often just guessing, and it's going to change. So before you write it, make sure you have these things in place. One is what we call a conceptual nearest neighbor. That's the paper, that's the term we use inside our programs, that's the paper that's closest to yours. In either your question, your method, your outcome, you often use it to calibrate your gap. So to say, hey, this paper brought us to here, my paper is going to contribute by bringing us to here. And that's going to give you instantly clarity on what was already known, what that paper didn't do, and what your value add actually is, because it's essential that comes out in the abstract. And I'm going to come back to that in a second. You also need to know that you've finished the study. You've actually done the methods so you can write and easily describe what you did. That's often the easiest part. The hard part of that is picking out which are the right details to include, so that readers, again at a glance, can see the strength and credibility of your study and see that it was a serious method and they can trust you. You also need to have your three to five main findings and conclusion. Again, you're not going to be able to pack in 20 findings, so you need to have that kind of prioritized highlight reel so that you give emphasis to explaining those rather than try to explain everything. Once you've kind of passed this gate and you have these things in place, already you're going to have solved 90% of the hardship of abstracts by writing at the right time in the workflow when you're ready. Just a quick interruption from today's sponsor, FastTrack. Oh wait, that's us. Listen, you don't need to struggle alone. You don't need to turn to AI for support. You can work with real people, have a real community, so you're not isolated and you don't feel stuck. I'm working together as a mentor, as a colleague, as a friend with a handful of researchers. If you're interested in checking out if you could be a good fit for our advanced support, our training that guides you every step of the way from defining your topic through to publishing and getting the big projects done, click the link below. Apply for a one-to-one consultation with me and we'll see if you could be a good fit and in that consultation we will identify right now what is the biggest thing holding you back from your progress. We have limited spots available just because we keep it small and intimate as there's only so many researchers I can work with, so don't wait. Click the link below and see if you could be a good fit. Now let's get back to the video. So next let's turn to two styles of abstracts. So broadly you'll see across fields two main formats for abstracts. The ones used more in medicine and sometimes natural sciences, public health, are structured abstracts where they'll have predefined sections such as background, methods, results, conclusions, that directly aligns to the sections of your paper. In others you have an unstructured abstract and that's more common in social science, economics, political science, sociology for example, and that's where sometimes researchers can go lost, not knowing really what goes where. So the way we tackle this is whichever type of abstract you're going to do, we make it a structured one first because that prevents you from missing key elements and once you have the elements in place you can always make it into a nice coherent prose later. So this step alone fixes a huge number of unstructured abstracts. Typically abstracts are going to be about 250 to 300 words depending on your field. You definitely want to know what the word length is for your abstract so you can budget accordingly. So now that you know we're going to take a structured approach, whichever type of abstract you're writing, we can begin to break it down and the first thing that we'll do is the background. And the background's purpose is simply to make a strategic case for why your study needs to exist and that is a mini snapshot of later on your introduction. If you want to watch our full introduction training check out this video here. It goes into way more detail than I'll do in this session but these will end up overlapping. Here in the abstract you just need in two or three sentences to explain why your study matters. Why is it important? What gap is it going to fill? That's hard to compress in two or three sentences and sometimes you might wrestle with what is the right way to frame and succinctly make your argument. Think of this almost like an elevator pitch to someone for why your study is important. So it's usually a why are we having this conversation now followed by what your study is going to do to fill in any gap. It often has a flavor of maybe there's widespread concerns about something happening but it's not clear whether the evidence supports this or that and so your study is going to plug that gap. That's just one example of the narrative format but again the generality is what I want you to see. There's some important conversation going on in the field which is why you're sending it to the journal, why people want to read it, but there's something missing. That's the gap. You're often calibrating that from your nearest neighbor paper which is going to help you in the stage and then what your study is going to do. Again you don't want a history lesson, a long justification, you just need a few sentences. For social sciences in this segment of the abstract I really like asking a research question. I find that's really engaging and people get instantly what your study is about, what its promise is, and what it's going to deliver. Next, the methods. This is I think the easiest section to write but the hardest in terms of plucking out which details should go in. So here's where I commonly see people stuffing in lots of unnecessary details. It's important here to be linear and restrained. You want to think of this as boosting credibility that the editors are going to see because the editors are often judging on the abstract whether or not they send it for a review. Peer reviewers are often making snap judgment about whether they want to accept or not your paper based on this abstract. So make it credible. And so what that means is not long extensive justifications about why you didn't do something or why you did something. Just go in and explain what you did in the most linear way possible to avoid confusion. Less is more here. So often you'll just be explaining for example turning to a quantitative example where your data came from and how you analyzed and that's it. What methods you employed. If you're doing for example a systematic review you might say which databases did you search, which articles did you include, and did you do a narrative synthesis or a meta-analysis without getting into long justifications. That lives elsewhere. The third part of the abstract is the results and this is commonly where abstracts fall apart. These should directly align to the top of your discussion section. If you're struggling with your discussion section check out this video right here that's going to walk you through it. It follows a predictable outline across fields. While the order varies the ingredients are common. But yes these three to five highlights and main findings that are kind of in your recap paragraph at the top of your discussion you want to have here. So you want to state these findings but in a way that shows rather than tells what you found. And so this is not something where you say you know what we found is important for policy. You actually need to show it. And so sometimes that involves saying right we found consistent evidence that X had an increased association with Y. You might quantify it say something about the strength. You definitely in quant work want to show the direction of that evidence. If you've done qualitative work you want to highlight the key themes that emerged. You want to again show some of that evidence rather than just tell it. And that gives more credibility to your evidence. You see there's the rigorous method that should be coming in contact and undergirding these results that you highlight. So again show rather than tell. It's okay to be specific about your evidence here. Finally conclusions. In my experience the conclusion section is the best to have one maybe two main takeaways and one implication for future research or policy. Only if that applies. So I tend to keep this again one max two sentences. I often see failure mode in abstracts of people having just one result if any packed in and then lots on conclusions. I flip that the other way around. Show more the strength of your results. Almost let the data speak for themselves. And the conclusion is where you inject yourself back in and you're interpreting them and what this means for the field. And again one two sentences generally is the max that we go for. So what does that look like? For example these findings suggest that or our evidence is consistent with that or this is strong evidence we found strong evidence for this. And maybe a follow-up sentence that could be future research should do this or there's a need for future research on that or policy may be needed on the following. You'll know because you'll have clarity on what those conclusions are because you'll have already done the study. You shouldn't be trying to figure this out at this stage. All right so I've told you what goes in these sections. It's also worth taking a breath to highlight what should not go in your abstract. So don't put citations. Typically there's just not they don't live there. You obviously can't put tables or figures. Sometimes there's a graphical abstract. That's a different thing. Again no vague results. No extensive methodological detail. Importantly you don't want filler words or jargon. So jargon is a problem here because you can't assume especially if your work is interdisciplinary that the reviewer who gets plucked out of the reviewer pool is going to know what that jargon means. And people inherently are negative to things they don't understand. You want to make it easy for your readers to access what you did and what you found and why it's important. So I do encourage you after you've written your abstract to re-read it closely. Look for any redundant words you can cut without losing meaning because you got to keep it concise and strip out any jargon. You can define those key terms technical terms or jargon if you need to use it in the introduction later on. So with that said let's take a look at a couple real abstracts so you can see this system in practice. Okay so here I've got one example from social science. Does democracy enhance health? Don't worry about the topic itself. This is an unstructured abstract. And so what you can see here in the beginning is this introduction here. That is specifying what the gap is or what the debate is. So it's clear what the study's entry point is going to be. Some argue this but research has challenged this argument and saying it could be that. So they're going to test this idea. Now you've got your method section using this source of data. So they've got a strong picture that they're painting here of the strength of their data and they're describing here they're showing you across models that they found these consistent effects on health outcomes and they further deepen the interpretation based on their results. Finally they get to this concluding bit of our results suggest what this means for for the field and potentially future research. So when you look at abstracts in this way you'll see that these sections even though they're not structured do follow a predictable structure. Now if I were going to improve this abstract I would probably have put the question here. I find this is a very boring way to open up the abstract. I might have tied a little bit the method simply to test these arguments. We did this and I might have shown a little bit more of the direction. Instead of just saying consistent effects on health outcomes I would have been a little bit clearer about what the health outcomes were and the direction of finding. But still the main point is for you to see how this can be done in action. And so when you write it again if you imagine you broke out those sections you could easily suture them back together. It's going to make sure you don't miss anything. Let's look at another example. So here's an example of a structured abstract. I intentionally kept this on the same theme and what you can see here is the background. Similarly it's a strategic argument for why the paper needs to exist. So previous analysis have had these certain limitations here and to plug that gap we use these data to test the associations. Okay but you get the idea. It's the same thing. Strategic argument. What's missing? What you're going to do? Methods. They go into more granular detail about where the data came from. How they linked it. And you see they're not justifying why these data were chosen. That's going to be done in the methods. Why they chose this method necessarily. They're just saying what they did. Findings. And then here you'll commonly see social sciences maybe outlining more broad contours. More public health medical findings will get into more specifics. Often reporting the significance. The effect sizes where applicable. And you can see here this really shows at a glance what they found. Finally you get a discussion and like I said just two three sentences max. This one is two and it has kind of the synthesis conclusion of what this means. That in this case democracies are better for health than autocracies. And that here a conclusion about what this might mean for the field. Again keeping it short, succinct. I think Hemingway would approve in this case. So that's it. If you follow these steps and write the abstract at the right time when you have all the ingredients you break it apart and you use a structured approach suturing it back if necessary. You're going to be done and dusted in 15 minutes because you're just going to slot in the evidence and the components of your paper that you've already assembled. So again the abstract isn't just about clever wording or making it incredibly sexy. It's about clear thinking at the right moment in the process. And if you enjoyed this video on how to write the abstract you're not going to want to miss this one on how to write academically. If you've never been trained on academic writing this will be a game changer.