An abstract is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding, or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose.
[1] When used, an abstract always appears at the beginning of a manuscript or typescript, acting as the point-of-entry for any given academic paper or patent application.
[3][4] This has the potential to mislead clinicians who rely solely on the information present in the abstract without consulting the full report.
"[10] The history of abstracting dates back to the point when it was felt necessary to summarise the content of documents in order to make the information contained in them more accessible.
During the Middle Ages, the pages of scholarly texts contained summaries of their contents as marginalia, as did some manuscripts of the Code of Justinian.
[11] The use of abstracts to summarise science originates in the early 1800s, when the secretary of the Royal Society would record brief summaries of talks into the minutes of each meeting, which were referred to as 'abstracts'.
Sometimes, abstracts are sectioned logically as an overview of what appears in the paper, with any of the following subheadings: Background, Introduction, Objectives, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions.
[23][24] Usually between 100 and 200 words, the informative abstract summarizes the paper's structure, its major topics and key points.
It is not intended to be as exhaustive a summary as the text abstract, rather it is supposed to indicate the type, scope, and technical coverage of the article at a glance.
[30] Many scientific publishers currently encourage authors to supplement their articles with graphical abstracts, in the hope that such a convenient visual summary will facilitate readers with a clearer outline of papers that are of interest and will result in improved overall visibility of the respective publication.
However, the validity of this assumption has not been thoroughly studied, and a recent study statistically comparing publications with or without graphical abstracts with regard to several output parameters reflecting visibility failed to demonstrate an effectiveness of graphical abstracts for attracting attention to scientific publications.
[31] Various methods can be used to evaluate abstract quality, e.g. rating by readers, checklists), and readability measures (such as Flesch Reading Ease).