Abstract vs. Summary

 An abstract is a short summary of a larger work, such as a dissertation or research paper. The abstract concisely report the aims and outcomes of your research so that readers know exactly what the paper is about.

Write the abstract at the very end, when you’ve completed the rest of the text. Follow these four steps:

1. State your research question and aims
2. Give a brief description of the methodology
3. Summarise your most significant findings or arguments
4. State your conclusion

An abstract is usually around 150–300 words, but there’s often a strict word limit, so make sure to check the requirements. Place the abstract on a separate page, after the title page and acknowledgments but before the table of contents.

When to write an abstract

You will almost always have to include an abstract when writing a thesis, dissertation, research paper, or submitting an article to an academic journal.

In all cases, the abstract is the very last thing you write. It should be a completely independent, self-contained text, not an excerpt copied from your paper or dissertation. An abstract should be fully understandable on its own to someone who hasn’t read your full paper or related sources.

The easiest approach to writing an abstract is to imitate the structure of the larger work—think of it as a miniature version of your dissertation or research paper. In most cases, this means the abstract should contain four key elements.

Step 1: State your aims

Start by clearly defining the purpose of your research. What question did you aim to answer? Use verbs like investigate, test, analyze or evaluate to describe exactly what you set out to do.

This part of the abstract can be written in the present or past simple tense, but should never refer to the future, as the research is already complete.

• This study will investigate the relationship between coffee consumption and productivity.
• This study investigates the relationship between coffee consumption and productivity.

Step 2: Describe your methods

Next, indicate the methods that you used to answer your question. This part should generally be a straightforward description of what you did in one or two sentences. It is usually written in the past simple tense as it refers to completed actions.

• Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 25 participants.
• Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 participants.

Don’t evaluate validity, obstacles or limitations here—the goal is not to give an account of the methodology’s strengths and weaknesses, but to give the reader a quick insight into the overall approach and procedures you used.

Step 3: Summarize your results

Give an overview of the main results of the research. This part of the abstract can be in the present or past simple tense.

• Our analysis has shown a strong correlation between coffee consumption and productivity.
• Our analysis shows a strong correlation between coffee consumption and productivity.
• Our analysis showed a strong correlation between coffee consumption and productivity.

Depending on how long and complex your research is, you might not be able to include all results here. Try to highlight only the most important findings that will allow the reader to understand your conclusions.

Step 4: Give your conclusion

Finally, state the main conclusion of your research: what is your answer to the research question? The reader should finish with a clear understanding of the central point that your research has proved or argued. Conclusions are usually written in the present simple tense.

• We concluded that coffee consumption increases productivity.
• We conclude that coffee consumption increases productivity.

If there are important limitations to your research (for example, related to your sample size or methods), you should mention them briefly in the abstract. This allows the reader to accurately assess the credibility of your research.

If your aim was to solve a practical problem, the conclusions might include recommendations for implementation. If relevant, you can briefly make suggestions for further research.

Tips for writing an abstract

It can be a real challenge to condense your whole dissertation into just a couple of hundred words, but the abstract will be the first (and sometimes only) part that people read, so it’s important to get it right. These strategies can help you get started.

Abstract

Word limit is given

Use related words

Avoid too much jargon

General to specific

Answer

Questions that readers may ask

One para

 

MAIN ASPECTS

 

The purpose/aim

 

Area/topic

 

Research Design

 

Main findings

 

Implications

 

Conclusions on how the paper ends

 

Follow the guidelines given

 

EXAMPLE

The present article reports a qualitative case study that targeted to investigate the secondary school (SS) English language (EL) teachers’ technological skills in Bangladesh. Educational technology has become an indispensable part of teaching-learning. Technologies for Language Learning and Teaching (TLLT) can provide language learners with exposure to authentic and intelligible language usage. EL teachers, consequently, need to have a good command over TLLT and its effective use. Following a multiple case study approach, data were collected from ten EL teachers of five SS through classroom observations, face-to-face interviews, and a structured questionnaire. The findings showed that most teachers had basic technology skills, but they made ineffective pedagogic use of technology. They need to use technology more often in the classroom and develop a pedagogical understanding of technology use for teaching English.

 

 

Summarizing means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or analyzing the source—you should simply provide a clear, objective, accurate account of the most important information and ideas, without copying any text from the original and without missing any of the key points.

When to summarize

There are many situations in which you might have to summarize an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material.
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read.
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review.

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay, research paper, or dissertation, you’ll engage with other researchers’ work in a variety of ways. Sometimes you might use a brief quote to support your point; sometimes you might paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research or to provide an overview of a source before you analyze or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the 4 steps outlined below to write a good summary.

Step 1: Read the text

You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

1. Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
2. Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
3. Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and re-read any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some easy tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract—this already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings—these should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: what did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

Step 2: Break the text down into sections

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller parts.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organized into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Try writing a word or phrase in the margin next to each paragraph that describes the paragraph’s content. Then you can see at a glance what each part of the article focuses on. If several paragraphs cover similar or related topics, you may group them together in sections.

Step 3: Identify the key points in each section

Now it’s time go through each part and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part:

Introduction	What research question or problem was addressed? Are there any hypotheses formulated?
Methods	What type of research was done? How was data collected and analyzed?
Results	What were the most important findings? Were the hypotheses supported?
Discussion/conclusion	What is the overall answer to the research question? How does the author explain these results? What are the implications of the results? Are there any important limitations? Are there any key recommendations?

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In this case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement—the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

Step 4: Write the summary

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

When summarizing as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source of the summary. The exact format for citing depends on your citation style, but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free Citation Generators.

Step 5: Check the summary against the article

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarizing lots of articles as part of your own work, it’s often a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.