Guidelines & Suggestions For Abstracts
Inge-Marie Eigsti, University of Connecticut

 

As someone who reviews and edits about a zillion conference abstracts a year, I share with you these thoughts on how to strengthen your abstract (and make reviewing easier for your co-authors).

1. Keep it parallel: If you introduce a set of groups, terms, conditions, variables – ALWAYS use that same ordering, every single place. That is, if you introduce your participant groups as young-ASD, old-ASD, young-TD, old-TD — present them in the same order every single time: in participant descriptions, Results, Tables and Figs, Discussion. Same thing for distinct measures: If you describe IQ first, then language, maintain that order throughout.

2. Include all relevant info in the abstract document for editing. When you send an abstract around, put everything in the word document, not just the text of the abstract – title, authors, name, location & date of conference, and current date. This will help you keep good records. Furthermore, your co-authors may be reviewing multiple abstracts for a given meeting – it can get hard to keep track (and this is relevant if people include the information on their CV).  This will also let co-authors comment on the authorship and order (and give us a chance to notice, if someone was inadvertently omitted).

3. Give the document title an informative name. As someone with multiple collaborators, you wouldn’t believe how many abstracts I receive before a conference deadline, each of which is titled “IMFAR-2010.” Give your document a more informative title: “Smith_IMFAR2010.” If I send you back a commented version (the “if” here is disingenuous – I always have comments), I’ll append my initials to the document title: “Mayo_IMFAR2010-ime”. That is to help you — you’ll perhaps receive comments back from other co-authors, so helps you avoid overwriting one document with the next.  Drop the “ime” if you send the document back for another round of comments.  This practice is called “version control” (an actual industry term) — it’s a VERY good skill.

4. Give co-authors time to comment. When you send an abstract around, you must share it in enough time for co-authors to give feedback – it’s poor form (and in fact unethical) to tell someone after the fact that their name is on something that they’ve not had time to comment on, or to expect feedback that day.

5. Prior to the conference, give co-authors an opportunity to give feedback on the presentation; it’s important to practice your poster spiel in advance. Certainly, you will want to practice a conference talk a million times.

6. When you hear about submission/rejection, inform your co-authors! Just forward the acceptance notice to all co-authors. That way everyone can add it to their CV.

7. Report exact p values – not just, p < .05. This is now standard practice. On the other hand, be thoughtful about how much precision to report in your group means.  Is your IQ measurement really accurate out to the hundredths (e.g., can we really distinguish between IQ scores of 108.95 versus 108.94?)? It is misleading to overstate the precision of your measure. Also, it contributes to “wordiness.”

8. Use appropriate APA formatting. It might not disappear when you enter the abstract (many online submission programs are pretty sophisticated); besides being a good habit, it helps your co-authors to read the text.  Thus, use the right formatting for citations, for statistics (italics for “F” and “p,” for example), etc.

9. Avoid distracting fonts. Use a serif font – one that has the little curlicues – something like Palatino or Times New Roman. Unless you must use it, avoid Arial (a sans-serif font). Avoid any weirdo fonts – American Typewriter or Book Antiqua or, heaven forbid, Comic Sans MS. Most people don’t care about this – it’s just my pecadillo – but please humor me.

10. Include a figure if you’re allowed to do so.

11. Reflect on the bigger picture. After you think through all the details, think about what this really tells us about autism, or development, or language, or brain function. Report this in your Discussion/last sentence (or the first!).

12. When your terrific abstract gets accepted, be proud! Then start working on your presentation right away. Sections you shouldn’t forget: acknowledgments (who paid the subjects? With what money? Who helped with recruitment?); references (very limited, on a poster; typically only 2-5); lots of figures; and next to the title, give the conference, its date and authors.

13. Make handouts. A handout is a one-page (8.5″ by 11″) version of the poster. The formatting has to change  – you probably want to make copies in B&W, and things get squished in funny directions – so allow time to prepare this and photocopy it. Make 50 copies at minimum; for a monster meeting like SRCD, you might want more. Use them for stationary later!

14. When presenting your poster, put up a blank piece of paper on the board. People will write their email address, so you can send a PDF of the poster (and when you write the manuscript, you can send that). It’s fun to see who is interested in your poster!

15. Register for the conference as soon as you know you are going – there are often cheaper rates, and also, some meetings (IMFAR) “fill up.” I try to register when I get the email of acceptance of my abstract. Otherwise, I forget until it’s too late.

16. Have a great time at the conference! Set a goal of introducing yourself to one well-known / more senior person whose work you admire.  Look for them after their talk, and then stalk them until you see a good moment to make contact. Have a question or comment on their talk (or a paper); a surefire question is to ask how they’re further pursuing xyz line of work.  People who seem famous to you aren’t generally treated like rock stars in everyday life; it’s nicer than you might expect for them to have you express interest.  My very famous grad school advisor told me that she still felt surprised when people had heard of her.

17.  Write all over your conference schedule/book of abstracts. Some meetings (SRCD) are so gigantic that you immediately recycle the book; but I keep abstracts from some conferences for years, because I write “cite this for XXX project.” It’s a great resource to have available when you’re writing a paper, to help you find relevant work.

18. Finally, conference preparation makes an excellent foundation for manuscript writing, because it resembles writing an outline. Writing always helps you to formulate your thoughts more clearly; preparing a poster or a talk often clarifies the structure of your project and how to best communicate it. So get to it, and write up the paper!