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One of the last things you need to do in your paper is to write an abstract. And there are two main goals

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that you want to achieve

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when you write an abstract. And the first goal is that you want to summarize your article. So you want

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to make it easy for readers to get the gist of your article which also makes it easier for other researchers

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to understand and cite your article.

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And the second goal is that you want to attract readers. You want to attract them to read your article

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and later to cite your article.

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So with that in mind, what would you want to include in your abstract? And the things you want to include are

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first of all and most importantly: your research question.

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Second, why your research question is interesting.

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Your answer to the question or what you contributed with your research. Why your answer is valuable.

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And finally the methods and results. And the order in which I presented them here is not the order in

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which you necessarily want to mentioned these things in the abstract but they are ordered by importance.

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The most important thing that you need to make absolutely clear is the research question. Then, why your

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question is interesting.

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Then, the answer that you contributed, why your answer is valuable, and the least important thing is

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methods and results.

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Okay with that in mind let's go through a little case study and I'm going to use my research paper again

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that you already know because that was actually a research paper where the abstract was a little bit tricky.

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And I want to show you how I solved the problems that I faced. So, here is the whole abstract.

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I was allowed to use 150 words for my abstract and I use them.

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And the first thing I want to show you is that this whole section here is the section in which I just

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sell my research question. And there was a reason for that because my problem was that my research question

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was a question of which people thought that it was already answered.

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So I knew that no researcher would be interested in my research if I don't make clear in the abstract

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that this is an unanswered question. And therefore, I devoted a third of my abstract to that.

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So I started by saying: "It is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously form trustworthiness

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impressions of newly encountered people from their facial appearance." And immediately after that I say:

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"However". Because I want to call that assumption into question as quickly as possible.

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And then I say that the empirical support for these spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions remains

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insufficient.

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And then I even make it more specific because I also say that "In particular, it remains an open question

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whether these impressions are encoded in memory."

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So these are a lot of words just devoted to selling the research question and I did that because I knew

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that if I would just state the research question nobody would be interested in my research. Okay.

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Then, next I explained the method and the results.

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And as you can see, that was a really small part of my abstract

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even though many people said that our method was very innovative.

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But now after understanding what's really important in a research paper which is that the question is

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interesting and that the answer is convincing you will understand why I chose to not focus on this strength

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of my research paper. And now, all the rest is just devoted to selling the answer to the question.

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"This was shown under conditions of varying contexts relevance and salience of trustworthiness.

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Moreover evidence for this tendency was obtained using both experimentally controlled artificial and

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naturalistic varying real faces."

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So all I'm really saying here is that these are very robust results. Then, "Taken together, these results

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suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from

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facial appearance, which is relatively independent of the contexts."

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So again, I point to the robustness of the results.

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And then: "As such, our results further underline how widespread influences of facial trustworthiness may

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be in our everyday life.

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So in the last sentence I also make a little bit clear what the value of our research is.

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So as you can see here, I spend most of my words to selling the research question and selling the answer.

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I did also mentioned methods and results but really really briefly.

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And so with this abstract I felt I have checked the most important boxes of a strong abstract. And that

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doesn't mean that in your case it has to look the same way.

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In your case, it may be that your research question is by itself already so interesting that just by

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stating it you've already captivated your reader.

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And in that case you may just mention your research question in one sentence. So it doesn't have to

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be that a third of your abstract is just focussed on selling the question.

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Instead, the point I want to make is one of priority.

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First, make sure that you sell your question well, whether that is in one sentence or two sentences or

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three sentences.

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Whatever works for you. Then, make sure that you sell your answer well. And then you can focus on describing

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your methods and results. OK so that's it for the abstract and in the next lecture I will show you how

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we can create a strong title for your research paper.