It’s that time again – the deadline for the next big conference in your field is fast approaching, and you are staring down a blank page. Where to start? How to make your abstract stand out and get noticed?
I recently had the opportunity to review conference abstracts for a major conference in our field. After reading over 50 abstracts for our session, the differences between outstanding abstracts and forgettable or insignificant ones became pretty clear. As I tried to articulate these thoughts for myself to evaluate the abstracts more consistently, I thought I should write it down for the benefit of the students that I supervise. I haven’t posted anything on here in a long time (sorry!), so then I also thought I would share it with the wider world in case it would be interesting for more of you.
Here are the most important things that I look for when evaluating conference abstracts:
Read the Call for Abstracts!
Make sure your abstract speaks to the text provided by the conference organizers for the conference or session. If your submission doesn’t fit the scope, it doesn’t matter how great your results are- it’s just in the wrong place! This might not even be an ideological thing (“eww, no sediment transport in our conference!”) but the truth is that if the people reviewing your abstract can’t understand your work or why it is relevant for the session/conference, it won’t be given the consideration it might be due.
Novelty & Originality: Where’s the New Thing?
How does your work bring science somewhere new and better? Did you discover a new physical phenomenon, bust long-held theories, present new/challenging-to-obtain/unexpected data, or come up with brand-new methods? Seeing cutting-edge science is one of the main reasons that people go to conferences in the first place, so share your most exciting new work!
Almost as important: don’t bury your cool new stuff! Make it extremely clear where the gap/shortcoming of existing research is, and how your new thing makes a difference. Of course it is bad to over-sell your science, but if you under-sell it too much, nobody will ever see your work!
Results & Conclusions: Do You Have Results?
The next thing I check is whether or not the authors seem to actually have any results yet. Writing conference abstracts tends to be a calculated extrapolation, especially if you are a grad student who is still building up your line of research: “based on my chosen method, preliminary findings, and where I plan to be in six months, this is what I will present“. But a lot can happen in those six months, so from the perspective of a conference organizer, demonstration that you already have presentable results by the time you submit the abstract gives them greater confidence that you will have something nice to share at the conference.
If you have model results, are they validated? Have you looked at the uncertainty in your results? If your fancy new numerical model has been checked against field or laboratory data, that inspires much more confidence.
Do you seem to know what those results mean? This means going from just noting that infragravity wave heights increase by 30% to telling us why that might be happening and why it matters (which leads to my next point…)
Significance: Will This Be Useful/interesting for Anyone Else?
Are your results important? How will this change our field? Truly revolutionary work is rare, but every step forward counts, and you need to make clear both the step you are making and in which direction.
Do you try to say something bigger/more useful beyond just your study site? The beautiful thing about studying coastal physics is that the processes you observe at one site are often true elsewhere. How might researchers from another country or field be able to use your findings? How might future work build upon what you’ve done? How does your work fit into the grand scheme of things? Keep your eyes on the horizon, zoom out!
Will your work likely have societal impact, in addition to scientific impact? We all love solving cool problems, but if you can demonstrate that your work is doing something useful or important for society, that makes your abstract much stronger.
Quality of Writing: Can I Follow Your Story?
Is the abstract coherent and well-written? I generally go into reading abstracts with a constructive mindset – I want to try and understand you and see your ideas, but if you don’t make it clear, I might not see.
Does it tell a story? There should be a clear thread running through your abstract, from “Oh jeez guys, we have a problem!” through to “We had a few ideas so we tried these things out” to “sure enough, we saw some things!” (or perhaps more interestingly: “to our surprise, we saw some other things!“), all the way to : “the stuff we found is pretty important because of these reasons“. Providing some sort of narrative structure makes it easier to see the novelty and significance of your work.
In my own work, I tend to follow the Nature Summary Paragraph Template for making my first iteration. It may seem a bit formulaic, but it has all of the elements I discussed here and helps fight the tyranny of the blank page1, so I always recommend it to my students. The important thing about scientific writing compared with more creative writing is that it does follow established conventions, so that people find the information they are looking for and can more easily evaluate your science. Deviating wildly from that structure only makes the reader’s job more difficult, and makes it less likely that your abstract will be accepted.
Hopefully these tips help your awesome science shine through and your abstracts get noticed! If you would like to see more posts like this, let me know in the comments.
- See William Zinsser’s On Writing Well for more good perspectives on fighting this sort of tyranny… ↩︎
Coastally Curious 