The Official Style on Research Paper Abstracts

The official style can be seen in many mediums, including abstracts for academic papers. Those are often the first thing one reads when reading a research paper. I came upon this abstract when working on the literature review for my capstone paper. The title of the academic paper is “Valuing subjectivity in journalism: Bias, emotions, and self-interest as tools in arts reporting.” The article was written by Phillippa Chong who is part of the Sociology Department of McMaster University in Canada. What the article was trying answer was how effective the use of bias, emotions, and self-interest are in journalistic publishing when captivating their audience. This was written during a time of strong political division so the questions they tried to answer is still relevant today.

            When preforming a readability test on the entire abstract, the following results came. The Gunning Fog is 23.9, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level showed 19.5, and the SMOG expressed 17.6. All these results showed that this abstract is of the official style. This certainly makes sense since this is an academic paper from a university.  This abstract also carries other parts of official style. Examples such the use of Subordination and a noun substitute in the second sentence. In the fourth and longest sentence, you will find an appositive phrase and relative clause. All of which is proof that this abstract was written for an older, or more educated audience.

            Even for academia, this abstract, as all others, should have a lower reading level than what is in the actual paper, and it does. If you look into the actual paper, you will notice a slightly higher reading level worth of text. For example in the ‘Data and Methods’ section, the readability scores start to get a little higher than the abstract. The first paragraph in that section shows the Gunning Fog is 21.94, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level showed 19.97, and the SMOG expressed 18.8. A minor increase with the exception of the Gunning Fog but done on purpose. Last but not least, the abstract is relatively short, and it doesn’t even take up a whole page.

For the 2018 STD Prevention Conference Scientific Program Committee, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a set of guidelines for abstract submissions. The CDC is a trustable source on this issue since they go through research very often and extensively for public health. To them, an abstract should cover the major parts of a project, study, or analysis and concise by not containing excess wordiness or unnecessary information. They should also be clear, as in readable, well organized, and not too jargon-laden. Lastly, cohesive by flowing smoothly between the parts. All with a limit of 300 words.

In a PowerPoint slide that explains why these regulations are important, in one bullet they explain “Helps the conference organizer decide if your project/study/analysis fits the conference criteria.” The other bullet in the slid states “Helps the conference audience decide whether to attend your presentation”. So the abstract was easier to read on purpose for the sake of attracting more people, even by the readability scores. After all, the lower the reading level of a text, the more people can actually read it. The readability scores for the abstract were certainly higher than normal but understandable given that the discourse community of the reviewers are nearly all college educated.

-Abdulla (Mustafa) A.  Gaafarelkhalifa