What most naturally follows?

How to summarize a journal article
Read the abstract.
Abstracts are short paragraphs written by the author to summarize research articles. Abstracts are usually included in most academic journals and are generally no more than 100-200 words.
The abstract provides a short summary of the content of the journal article, providing you with important highlights of the research study. The purpose of an abstract is to allow researchers to quickly scan a journal and see if specific research articles are applicable to the work they are doing.