Structure for an Effective Abstract

There are many good references for scientific writing, including guidelines and advice for writing an abstract. Below is my brief version. An effective abstract should include a statement or sentence for each numbered topic/idea below. In some cases (e.g., statement of results), more than one sentence may be needed.

1 State the general topic of subject of your research.

2 State why that topic is important or why more knowledge about it is needed.

3 State the main question or hypothesis(es) of your research. It should be a subset of (1).

4 State how you addressed (3) in practice -- including study design, sampling strategy, variables measured, and/or methods used.

5 State how you analyzed your data.

6 Summarize your results.

7 State implications of your results for (1), (2), or whatever management, conservation, policy, etc decisions your work bears upon.

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