Common Patterns and Discourse Conventions of English Research Articles Abstracts in Scientific and Educational Fields

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.

Beckett, N.S., Peters, R., Fletcher, A.E., Staessen, J.A., Liu, L., Dumitrasco, D.,...Bulpitt, J. (2008) Treatment of Hypertension in Patients 80 Years of Age or Older (Abstract). The New England Journal of Medicine, 358,18. Retrieved April 2^nd 2010 from http: // www.nejm.org.                           

Hubbuch, S. M. (1996). Writing research papers across the curriculum. (4^th ed.). Harcourt Brace: Fort Worth, TX.

Martinez, C., LAssimes, T., Mines, D.,Dell’Aniello, S. & Suissa, S. (2009). Use of venlafaxine compared with other antidepressants and the risk of sudden cardiac death or near death: a nested case-control study (Abstract). BMJ 2010;340:c249 Doi:10.1136/bmj.c249

Kokonis, M. (1993). The Video in the Classroom: Agatha Christie’s ´Evil Under the Sun´ and the Teaching of Narratology through Film (Abstract). 12p.; In: Verbo-Visual Literacy: Understanding and Applying New Educational Communication Media Technologies. Selected Readings from the Symposium of the International Visual Literacy Association (Delphi, Greece, June 25-29, 1993); see IR 017 742

Rammal, S. (2006) Video in EFL Classroom. Retrieved from http://Using English.com

Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (1994). Academic Writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Harbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Weissberg, R., & Burke, S. (1990). Writing Up Research. Experimental Research Report for Students of English.  Prentice Hall Regents. Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632.