Reactions

Letters to the editor

Abstracts

The Sept. 16 editorial “Humorous Brevity” offers a teaching moment on how not to write an abstract (C&EN, page 2). The two examples in the editorial propagate a common misunderstanding because of which abstracts and conclusions in many published papers are almost indistinguishable.

The conclusion is precisely that: conclusions, like “Probably not” and “Yes” in the two abstracts mentioned in the editorial. An abstract, on the other hand, should contain the background and motivation of the work, the state of the art, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, and future work, all condensed into about 250 words.

I tell students to pick key sentences in each of these sections in the manuscript and string them together into a concise narrative. Not an easy task. This is much harder than the brevity sought by the authors, which could have been better accomplished by writing the conclusion into the titles—“The Sequence of Earthquakes in Southern California, with Aftershocks Removed, Is Poissonian” and “Quantum Weak Measurement Is Probably Not an Explanation for Apparent Superluminal Neutrino Speeds”—giving an opportunity for the authors to write a traditional abstract, one that encapsulates the entire paper, not just states the conclusion.

Sanjeeva Murthy
Princeton, New Jersey