Abstracts all the way down

January 15, 2024 3:05 AM

We share the following sample of 24 abstracts here as an invitation [SLPDF], should anyone wish to develop these ideas. Furthermore, abstracts themselves constitute a genre of scholarly communications, the art of which might be developed to make research more accessible, abstracts themselves being situated in front of paywalls.

Ulmer, Jasmine B., and James M. Salvo. "Abstracts and Their Mysterious In-Betweens: Attuning to the Lacuna of Scholarly Communications." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 23.1 (2023): 25-34.

posted by cupcakeninja (5 comments total)

I _think_ that Jasmine and James are suggesting that mining their discarded ideas will be more fruitful for me than sitting on the sofa gazing at the ceiling for inspiration. My formal career in science was not lacking in ideas, it was lacking in Finish. I've discs full of data, drawers full of abstracts and rejected manuscripts, USB keys full of presentations, notebooks full of insights . . . but only a tuthree dozen peer reviewed actual Papers. And of those, only three have set out convincingly original ideas; and of those, one was shown later to be wrong.

One implication is that a couple of half ideas, batted about between different people, can become something solid and useful. I can get behind that.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:48 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]

Interesting! Like a scholarly Freecycle.
posted by eirias at 4:11 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

For FPSAC, you don't submit a paper, but an "extended abstract", which itself has an abstract, something I have always found endlessly amusing.
posted by hoyland at 4:40 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

Before I’d properly begun reading this, I thought it was going to be some systematic review [or regular comparative review] of a bunch of different abstracts. The paper itself is still neat, but I’d love to see somebody mine the sea of abstracts that already exist…I wonder whether there are certain patterns or rhetorical devices that can contribute to a paper’s success, for example, or common mistakes folk make when writing them.

I happened to submit my PhD thesis on Friday and panicked when I realised a week before submission that I’d completely neglected to write an abstract. Turns out there are papers on abstracts, too, although most of what I found felt like an author’s personal perspective and general observations on structure. Even that paper feels to me like the similar blog posts you find with a cursory search rather than, say, a survey that summarises the community’s perspective…which is really handy to have if you’re still learning, even if the contributions are obvious to experienced academics.

I’d love to see more research on research!
posted by probablytom at 6:57 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]

Woot woot probablytom. Submitting your PhD thesis and your first comment on MeFi - wot a week. Congratulations on the PhD: at this moment nobody on the planet knows more about that stuff than you do.
One thing that's become more normal since my PhD is, as well as the Abstract (for ppl in the field), there is a requirement for a Lay Summary of similar length. That should be written for your college room-mate who went in a totally different direction and/or the politicians who decide to allocate money to research and/or your institute's publicity department for the press release. In my experience Scientists are generally crap at writing Lay.Summs. They cannot escape the Curse of Knowledge to imagine what it was like before they knew their onions.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:40 PM on January 15 [4 favorites]