ABSTRACT GUIDELINES

Abstracts must include sufficient information for reviewers to judge the nature and significance of the topic, the adequacy of the investigative strategy, the nature of the results, and the conclusions. The abstract should summarize the substantive results of the work and not merely list topics to be discussed. An abstract is an outline/brief summary of your paper and your whole project. It should have an intro, body, and conclusion. It is a well-developed paragraph, should be exact in wording, and must be understandable to a wide audience.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, formatted in Microsoft Word, and single-spaced, using size 12 Times New Roman font. Abstracts highlight major points of your research and explain why your work is important; what your purpose was, how you went about your project, what you learned, and what you concluded. If your title includes scientific notation, Greek letters, bold, italics, or other special characters/symbols, do make sure they appear correctly. List all additional undergraduate co-authors, whether they are or are not presenting, if applicable. List additional faculty mentors, if applicable.

Learning how to write an abstract for a conference is a critical skill for early-career researchers. The purpose of an abstract is to summarize – in a single paragraph – the major aspects of the paper you want to present, so it’s important you learn to write a complete but concise abstract that does your conference paper justice.

Your conference abstract is often the only piece of your work that the conference organizer will see, so it needs to be strong enough to stand alone. And once your work is accepted or published, researchers will only consider attending your presentation or reading the rest of your paper if you’re abstract compels them to.

An abstract for a conference

The formula for how to write an abstract

When considering how to write an abstract, follow this formula:  topic + title + motivation + problem statement + approach + results + conclusions = conference abstract

1. Abstract topic

How will your abstract convince the conference organizers that you’ll add to the discussion on a particular topic at their event? Your conference presentation will have limited scope, so choose an angle that fits the conference topics and consider your abstract through that lens.

2. Abstract title

What is your conference paper about and what makes it interesting? A good rule of thumb is to give your abstract a title of 12 words or less.

3. Motivation

Why should your readers care about the problem and your results? This section should include the background to your research, the importance of it, and the difficulty of the area.

4. The problem

What problem are you trying to solve? Are you using a generalized approach, or is it for a specific situation? (If the problem your research addresses are widely recognized, including this section before motivation.) Clearly, state the topic of your paper and your research question in this section.

5. Study design

How did you approach solving the problem or making progress on it? How did you design your study? What was the extent of your research?

6. Predictions and results

What findings or trends did your analysis uncover? Were they as you expected, or not?

7. Conclusions

What do your results mean? How will they contribute to your field? Will they shake things up, speed things up, or simply show other researchers that this specific area may be a dead end. Are your results general (or generalizable) or highly specific?