Students will complete abstract for research question for final project. All
12th grade ELA students must follow the abstract guideline sheet:
How to Write an Abstract
Abstract
Because on-line search databases typically contain only abstracts, it is vital
to write a complete but concise description of your work to entice potential
readers into obtaining a copy of the full paper. This article describes how to
write a good computer architecture abstract for both conference and journal
papers. Writers should follow a checklist consisting of: motivation, problem
statement, approach, results, and conclusions. Following this checklist should
increase the chance of people taking the time to obtain and read your complete
paper.
Introduction
Now that the use of on-line publication databases is prevalent, writing a
really good abstract has become even more important than it was a decade ago.
Abstracts have always served the function of "selling" your work. But now,
instead of merely convincing the reader to keep reading the rest of the
attached paper, an abstract must convince the reader to leave the comfort of
an office and go hunt down a copy of the article from a library (or worse,
obtain one after a long wait through inter-library loan). In a business
context, an "executive summary" is often the only piece of a report read by
the people who matter; and it should be similar in content if not tone to a
journal paper abstract.
Checklist: Parts of an Abstract
Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, it must do almost as much
work as the multi-page paper that follows it. In a computer architecture
paper, this means that it should in most cases include the following sections.
Each section is typically a single sentence, although there is room for
creativity. In particular, the parts may be merged or spread among a set of
sentences. Use the following as a checklist for your next abstract:
Motivation:
Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn't
obviously "interesting" it might be better to put motivation first; but if
your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as
important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement first to
indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on.
This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the
area, and the impact it might have if successful.
Problem statement:
What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a
generalized approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too
much jargon. In some cases it is appropriate to put the problem statement
before the motivation, but usually this only works if most readers already
understand why the problem is important.
Approach:
How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use
simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data
for an actual product? What was the extent of your work (did you look at one
application program or a hundred programs in twenty different programming
languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure?
Results:
What's the answer? Specifically, most good computer architecture papers
conclude that something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or
otherwise better than something else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid
vague, hand-waving results such as "very", "small", or "significant." If you
must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk about
orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should
not provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand
you don't have room for all the caveats.
Conclusions:
What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world
(unlikely), be a significant "win", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road
sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results
are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific
to a particular case?
Other Considerations
An abstract must be a fully self-contained, capsule description of the paper.
It can't assume (or attempt to provoke) the reader into flipping through
looking for an explanation of what is meant by some vague statement. It must
make sense all by itself. Some points to consider include:
Meet the word count limitation. If your abstract runs too long, either it will
be rejected or someone will take a chainsaw to it to get it down to size. Your
purposes will be better served by doing the difficult task of cutting
yourself, rather than leaving it to someone else who might be more interested
in meeting size restrictions than in representing your efforts in the best
possible manner. An abstract word limit of 150 to 200 words is common.
Any major restrictions or limitations on the results should be stated, if only
by using "weasel-words" such as "might", "could", "may", and "seem".
Think of a half-dozen search phrases and keywords that people looking for your
work might use. Be sure that those exact phrases appear in your abstract, so
that they will turn up at the top of a search result listing.
Usually the context of a paper is set by the publication it appears in (for
example, IEEE Computer magazine's articles are generally about computer
technology). But, if your paper appears in a somewhat un-traditional venue, be
sure to include in the problem statement the domain or topic area that it is
really applicable to.
Some publications request "keywords". These have two purposes. They are used
to facilitate keyword index searches, which are greatly reduced in importance
now that on-line abstract text searching is commonly used. However, they are
also used to assign papers to review committees or editors, which can be
extremely important to your fate. So make sure that the keywords you pick make
assigning your paper to a review category obvious (for example, if there is a
list of conference topics, use your chosen topic area as one of the keyword).
Conclusion
Writing an efficient abstract is hard work, but will repay you with increased
impact on the world by enticing people to read your publications. Make sure
that all the components of a good abstract are included in the next one you write.