Abstracts have been defined as
“brief summaries of the major points made by an author in a book or article.”
(Hubbuch, 1996, p.126). According to Weissburg and Buker (1990), the abstract
provides the reader with a brief preview of a study based on information from
the other sections of the report. Furthermore, according to the American
Psychological Association (APA, 2007) all the data included in the abstract
depend on the type of paper. The present study analyses four abstracts on the
medicine and educational fields respectively, with the purpose of providing the
reader with a comprehensive view of abstracts’ structure, features and format
following APA conventions as well as Swales and Feak’s (1994) requirements.
Firstly, the two articles on
medicine are alike in several aspects. Both of them are informative and
represent a formal summary of a finished Research Paper (RP). APA (2007) states that abstracts should not
be longer than two hundred words, however both RP have been written in more
than two hundred words and digits have been used instead of numbers. Similarly,
both abstracts do not include keywords, a resource employed by researchers in
final works on the web or databases. With respect to their structures, they do
not include headings.
Martinez, Lassimes, Mines,
Dell’Aniello and Suissa (2009) organize their research paper into objectives,
design, setting, participants, results and conclusion, whereas Beckett at al.
(2008) present some background information, a method section, the results and
conclusion of their research paper. This organization may possibly show that
empirical studies generally contain similar elements depending on the
requirements and kind of study. Regarding format, it is possible that Martinez
et al. (2009) do not follow the suggested rules according to APA (2007)
probably because of publisher’s requirements. For instance, the abstract is
placed on the first page together with the introduction to the research;
moreover, the term is on the left and in bold.
By contrast, Beckett et al. (2008) appeared to
have fulfilled APA (2007) guidelines related to abstracts format. The
linguistic features described by Swales and Feak (1994) are achieved
successfully by the aforementioned authors who make use of full sentences,
impersonal passive tenses, absence of negatives and avoidance of abbreviations
and jargon. As regards tenses, the article on hypertension alternates between
present, present perfect and past while in the one on antidepressants only
present tense has been used.
Abstracts in the
educational field differ considerably from scientific abstracts in the sense
that they are not informative but indicative. According to Swales and Feak
(1994), indicative abstracts include a general summary of the information in an
article and look to the future without considering any specific results.
Furthermore, Kokonis (1993) and Ramal’s (2006) abstracts are unstructured, both
of them made use of full sentences as well as impersonal passive voice. There
is a predominance of the present tense throughout the papers and negatives and
jargon are avoided.
Abstracts on education analyzed
in the present paper do not meet APA (2007) requirements regarding format. Both
of them are included within the main body of the articles and they do not include
the page header. The “Abstract” term is placed on the left margin. Moreover,
whereas Rammal‘s (2006) abstract has less than one hundred words, Kokonis’
(1993) is about two hundred words long, but it has been indented. Neither of
the authors list keywords or include numbers probably because it is a
qualitative RP not a quantitative one.
Overall, Hubbuch (1996) states
that abstracts are brief summaries of a book or article. Moreover,
abstracts are written for diverse purposes but what is of paramount importance
is that they are aimed at providing prospective readers the opportunity to
judge the relevance of the longer piece of work to be read. Thus, the medical
and educational abstracts by Martinez et al. (2009), Beckett et al. (2008),
Kokonis (1993) and Rammal (2006) can be analyzed and taken as examples in order
to visualize the essential features of RP abstracts.
References
American Psychological
Association (2007). Concise rules of APA
style. Washington, DC: British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
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Fletcher, A.E., Staessen, J.A., Liu, L., Dumitrasco, D.,...Bulpitt, J. (2008)
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