How to write an abstract How to write an abstract The purpose of the abstract is to provide the reader with an overview of the essential aspects of the paper or presentation.
Readers often decide whether to listen to a talk or to read an article on the basis of the abstract.
Thus, being able to write a good abstract is an important skill to have. Writing an abstract is often a challenge because one is usually limited to just a few hundred words. These constraints can be helpful though since they force the writer to identify the fundamental aspects of the research or presentation. This is a typical length restriction for most papers presented at scientific meetings. The first one or two sentences of an abstract should provide a context for the specific study being presented.