Requirements to the structure, content and wordage of an abstract

  • An abstract should contain essential facts of the article; it shouldn’t exaggerate or contain the material which is absent from the main part of the publication.
  • The structure of the abstract should repeat the structure of the article and should include introduction, aims and objectives, methods, results, and conclusions.
  • However, the subject, theme and the goal of the article are stated only in the case if they are not clear from the title of the article; methods or methodology of conducting research is desirable to describe in the case if they have originality or if they are of particular interest from the point of view of this publication.
  • The results of work should be described in a very accurate and informative way.
  • The abstract should include theoretical and experimental results, factual data, the discovered relations and regularities. Moreover, it is desirable to present the results and data of long-term importance, significant discoveries, conclusions which contradict the existing theories, and also data which, in the author’s opinion, have practical value.
  • Conclusions may be accompanied by recommendations, evaluations, offers, hypotheses described in the article.
  • Information contained in the title of the article mustn’t be repeated in the abstract.
  • It is necessary to avoid excessive parenthetic phrases (e.g. “the author of the article considers…”).
  • Historical references, if they are not the main part of the document, description of earlier research and common statements are not given in the abstract.
  • The text of the abstract should be written with the use of syntax constructions typical of scientific and technical documentation; complex grammatical structures should be avoided.
  • The abstract should include significant ideas from the article.
    The text of the abstract must be short-spoken and clear, free from minor details, excessive parentheses, common and meaningless phrases.
    The text should be coherent, separate statements should logically follow one another.
  • Abbreviations and signs, except common ones, are used only in exceptional cases or it is necessary to give their interpretation and definition when they are used in the abstract for the first time.
  • The abstract doesn’t give references to the number of a publication in the bibliography for the article.
  • The wordage of the article depends on the content of the article (volume of information, its scientific and/or practical value), but it MUSTN’T BE LESS THAN 100-250 WORDS (for publications in Russian a bigger wordage is desirable).