Activity: Browse Abstracts

Overview

Being able to efficiently scan scholarly publications for key information is critical for knowing the research conversations that are already taking place, and identifying where your research fits in. An abstract is typically the first part of an article that is read.

An abstract is a concise summary of a scholarly publication. It is usually a paragraph, and it may follow a formal structure, such as Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD).  An abstract:

• lets readers get the gist or essence of a paper or article quickly, in order to decide whether to read the full paper;
• prepares readers to follow the detailed information, analyses, and arguments in a full paper;
• helps readers remember key points.

When using search engines and literature databases, key word searches often focus on terms found in the title, abstract, and indexing of a publication.  After doing your search, you can then scan the title and abstracts to determine whether the full publication is likely to be useful to you.

In the case of scientific conferences, sometimes an abstract is all that’s formally published about a presentation.  This is particularly common with poster presentations. Even though conference abstracts are brief, they can still be very informative. You can learn about ongoing research that hasn’t yet been published in article form, and you can follow those leads to track down other sources of public information about the researchers and their research projects.

Activity: Browse Conference Abstracts

Some conference websites and professional association websites allow anyone to search and browse conference abstracts from a given year.  For example, you can find and read abstracts from the 2019 Society for Neuroscience Meeting using this “meeting planner” on the conference website.

Some literature databases, such as the multidisciplinary Web of Science database, also include conference abstracts.  When you do a search, you can refine your results to “Meeting Abstracts.”  Scan the results to learn about research and researchers that you might follow.  You might want to set up an alert to watch for future full-length articles by those researchers.