how to write extended abstract

The Abstract and Extended Abstract

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• David M. Schultz  

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Having decided to attend a certain conference, your ticket to receiving a presentation at that conference is the abstract. If your abstract is accepted into the conference, you may be asked to produce an extended abstract. What are the strategies in writing and submitting successful abstracts? Under what circumstances should you submit an extended abstract? This chapter discusses these and other questions related to the abstract submission process.

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© 2009 David M. Schultz

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Schultz, D.M. (2009). The Abstract and Extended Abstract. In: Eloquent Science. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-935704-03-4_23

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Welcome to CHI 2013

Guide to a successful extended abstracts submission, introduction.

While the emphasis of submissions to the HCI Archive is on the long lasting contributions of rigorous research (i.e. the content should be correct and repeatable), the emphasis of submissions to the Contemporary Trends section should be on the immediate relevance of the material to practitioners (i.e. the content should be pertinent and timely). Because of this distinction, authors should consider very different questions as they produce their submission. Unlike the HCI Archive, acceptance of Contemporary Trends submissions will focus less on rigorous examination of methodology or statistical significance. Instead, reviewers will be instructed to consider the spirit of the writing and the overall desire of the intended audience to know about the content being presented.

For example, submissions with weak methodology (perhaps only evaluating a design with three or four convenient users, or not evaluating a design at all) can be accepted if it still articulates an interesting conclusion or shows a compelling creation and the submission is of interest to the various communities. Some examples of topics that might be inappropriate for the HCI Archive, but would be of immediate interest to Contemporary Trends, include:

• The role of intuition in the development of design solutions for complex problems
• An analysis of form, aesthetics and emotion in the creation of a particular company’s brand identity and product development
• A chronicle of the design of a flawed information architecture structure, and the resulting chaos that ensued as the project went live
• A description of the political environment in which design is conducted in a particular company

Please note that Extended Abstract submissions do not need to be anonymized. Author names and affiliations can be stated on the submitted document(s).

The Review Form

The following is a description of the form reviewers will use to guide and submit their review of your submission. We suggest that familiarity with the questions on the review form will help you to decide what to include or emphasize in your paper.

The questions on the review form ask the reviewer for the following:

• A rating of the reviewer’s own expertise in the topic area of the submission, from 4 (expert) to 1 (no knowledge); this helps members of the various committees to resolve conflicting views on submissions.
• Statement of the timeliness of the contribution to HCI; this provides the committee with a basis for assessing the significance of the contribution, and for judging whether all the reviewers agree on what the contribution is.
• A review of the submission in terms of the criteria laid out in the particular submission category’s Call.
• Any aspects of the submission’s written presentation that need improvement.
• A rating of the submission’s acceptability, from 5 (high) down to 1 (low). Submissions whose contribution is judged significant are rated 4 or 5, depending on whether or not they contain any flaws.

Reviewers can also add further comments that they want you or the committee to see. The main concerns for you to keep in mind are those numbered 2, 3, and 4: you should offer the reviewers a strong, well-presented contribution to HCI that meets the criteria in the Call. If you do this, your contribution should get a high rating.

Contribution and Benefit Statement

Along with your submission you must present a 30-word statement of contribution and benefit. This statement is not part of your paper, but it is important in assisting the review committee as they examine your submission. Your submission’s reviewers will be asked to focus on the timeliness of the contribution to HCI, the benefit others can gain from its results, and its originality. We suggest it may be useful to draft this statement before you begin writing your paper, to help keep the contribution and benefit in sharp focus. Examples showing how to write such statements will be found at the end of this guide.

Contribution Statement

CHI asks for just one such contribution. You may be tempted to offer more than one; for example, a new design and a new method by which you evaluated it. Due to the limited number of pages and space, you are advised to resist this temptation, and focus on presenting one strong contribution very well. If you offer several contributions of different types, reviewers may be confused as to which is the contributions primary focus. Furthermore, you will probably find it difficult to do justice to more than one contribution in such a limited quantity of pages. Should you find you have several strong contributions to offer – and you have time to spare – consider submitting them as separate contributions.

Benefit Statement

If you are in a position to make a contribution to HCI, there will be people who stand to benefit from it. For example, if you are presenting an innovative interaction technique for small screens, it will be of potential use to people involved in developing handheld computers. A case study describing how you developed a new interactive product will probably catch the eye of HCI educators looking for teaching materials. The benefit to be gained from your contribution will be one consideration that reviewers take into account.

As you write or develop your contribution, therefore, keep in mind the kinds of people you think might benefit from reading it. Think also about how this might happen – what kinds of problems might readers be facing to which your paper could provide the solution. Try to make sure that the paper explains the contribution in sufficient detail for the full benefit to be extracted.

Describing the Work Clearly and Concisely

You might be surprised at the historically large number of reviewer complaints about written presentation. Describing your work involves not only good prose, but also providing a good structure that helps the reader follow the explanation. The text should be supported with figures, tables and even videos where appropriate; these should be clear and easy to understand. For example, strong imagery is of primarily importance to the Design Community; consider how you can create a sense of narrative through the use of multiple images in a storyboard fashion. Submissions may use color figures, but they should be usable when printed in black and white in the paper proceedings.

Although all presentations at CHI are made in English, CHI is a conference with an international audience – and an international panel of reviewers. Submissions must be written in a language that effectively communicates across national and cultural boundaries. When authors are not native speakers of English, reviewers try to assess the quality of the work independent of language issues, but good English always helps. If you are not a native English speaker but have access to those who are, it is a good idea to ask them to proof-read your paper before you submit it. Even if your first language is English, keep in mind that non-native English speakers will be reading and reviewing the paper. Avoid long, complex sentences as well as regional colloquialisms, jokes, or puns that could be difficult for someone outside your culture to understand.

In summary, try to write clearly and concisely, avoid jargon, organize the paper to flow logically and smoothly, provide the right level of detail, and make good use of figures to support the text.

Final Comments

Contemporary Trends are reviewed on an ‘as-is’ basis, and cannot be accepted conditionally upon making changes. This is unavoidable given the tight schedule of the reviewing process: there is no time for a second review after the author has made changes, so reviewers must make a decision whether the submission in its current form is acceptable for CHI.

Finally, when writing your paper you should resist the temptation to describe future work, or work expected to be completed before the final submission or conference. Although these planned activities are often interesting, you cannot rely on them to get your paper accepted. On the contrary, they may be seen by reviewers as evidence that the submission is premature, and you may be advised to resubmit when more of the work has been completed.

Examples of Contribution and Benefit Statements

A contribution/benefit statement describes the contribution made by the contributions to HCI and the benefit that readers can gain from it. These are stated in two sentences, the first sentence making clear what type of contribution (technique, system, guideline, etc.) is offered. See the following examples:

• Case study describing development of a physical environment that allows young children to program stories. Can assist designers in understanding how to involve users, especially in formative design stages.
• Describes a sound-enhanced system based on Instant Messaging, supporting presence awareness and opportunistic interactions among mobile, distributed groups. Can help mobile people stay connected in a lightweight, enjoyable way.
• Describes an adaptive technique for improving focus-targeting in distortion-based visualizations that flattens the view based on pointer speed. The technique can significantly reduce targeting times and targeting error.
• Describes an implementation of CPM-GOMS in the Apex modeling platform that automates many steps in model development. Requires less modeling knowledge and saves interface designers time when conducting CPM-GOMS analyses.
• Extends the Cognitive Walkthrough method to group situations by treating individual and collaborative tasks separately. Presents practitioners with a clear method for evaluating groupware usability.
• Presents guidelines for designers of learner-centered tools based on a case study of a scaffolded software environment. Can assist in developing effective scaffolded tools.

Please follow the style of these examples in composing your statement, and please try to keep it to 30 words or less.

Written by David Gilmore, Jon Kolko, Bill Lucas, and Helena Mentis for CHI 2007.

CHI 2013 "Changing Perspectives" in collaboration with the First ACM European Computing Research Congress

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Advice to Authors of Extended Abstracts

William Pugh

Dept. of Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

Univ. of Maryland, College Park

This article stems from discussions among the program committee for SIGPLAN’91 PLDI. The program committee thought it might be useful to put together some advice for authors. To give some context to these suggestions, I’ve also provided a brief description of the process by which the conference papers were reviewed, partially from my perspective. This process is similar to the way most SIGPLAN conferences are run, although the details differ for each conference.

How the Papers Were Reviewed:

There were 169 extended abstracts submitted to the SIGPLAN ‘91 PLDI conference. At the request of the program committee chair, program committee members (and their graduate students) refrained from submitting any abstracts to the conference. This allowed us to avoid having to deal with direct conflict of interests.

Each program committee member was assigned 60 abstracts, based on his or her areas of expertise. Since all abstracts were sent to all committee members, members could review any abstracts they wished, so long as they reviewed at least the abstracts assigned to them. Program committee members could review the abstracts themselves or have others review them, although in most cases the program committee members at least briefly reviewed all the abstracts they were assigned, even if they had colleagues review some of them in detail for them.

I wasn’t able to read any abstracts until after the semester ended in mid-December, and I allowed myself a week off from reading abstracts for Christmas. Thus, I had about four weeks to read the abstracts, and I couldn’t spend much more than 20 hours a week reading them (due to limitations both on available time and the amount of reviewing I could do in a day before I suffered burnout). Since I read more abstracts than I was assigned, this came down to an average of one hour per abstract.

In reading an abstract, I had to try to understand the work presented, the significance of it, and possible problems with it. I spent at least 30-40 minutes on almost every abstract, sometimes coming back to an abstract several times. I spent over four hours each on several abstracts. In one case this was because the abstract looked interesting but was badly written; in another case, because the abstract dealt with a dense subject. In several cases, I spent several hours on a paper simply because I had expertise or interest in the topic described by the paper.

The program committee met for two days to discuss the submitted abstracts and choose those to be accepted. A preliminary numerical ranking provided by the reviews received in advance of the meeting helped structure our discussions. On each of several passes through all the submissions, some papers were eliminated from consideration, others were retained for further discussion and some were accepted. Finally, we had a total of 28 accepted papers.

What is an Extended Abstract?

An extended abstract is not simply a long abstract. An extended abstract should contain references, comparisons to related work, proofs of key theorems and other details expected in a research paper but not in an abstract.

An extended abstract is a research paper whose ideas and significance can be understood in less than an hour. Writing an extended abstract can be more demanding than writing a research paper.

Some things that can be omitted from an extended abstract: future work, details of proofs or implementation that should seem plausible to reviewers, ramifications not relevant to the key ideas of the abstract.

Some Issues Considered by the Committee:

• Are there any major technical flaws in the abstract? In a few rare cases, reviewers found serious technical flaws in a submission.

Is the work a significant advance over previous work in the area, by the same authors or others? The abstract should give a clear description of the advantages offered by the new technique over previous techniques. Simply describing an interesting new way of doing something that could be done as simply and efficiently by previous techniques won’t get an abstract accepted. The best abstracts gave a clear description of what their results allowed that couldn’t be done previously and why that is significant. Examples and measurements are great for this.

A related problem is not citing relevant work in the area. Don’t rely on the program committee realizing that X’s work in this area doesn’t apply because you are considering a slightly different problem that renders X’s methods unusable.

If you have additional current papers on topics related to your submission (accepted by or submitted to other conferences or journals), be sure to discuss the contribution of your submission over that of your other papers.

If the work involves a specialized application, does it make a more general contribution? Some abstracts described interesting specialized applications. Much of the content of these abstracts involved descriptions of the context of the work or applying standard techniques in the new context. In some cases, it was unclear if the resulting paper would be useful to people not interested in the author’s specific application.

If you submit an extended abstract involving a specialized application, be sure the significant contributions of your work don’t get lost in the details of your application.

• Does the abstract offer an interesting perspective on a problem or describe experience that might be useful to others? Several committee members lamented that although several authors had built substantial systems, and tried several approaches to learn which ones worked and which ones didn’t, the authors only wrote abstracts about narrow technical results related to their systems. Relevant comments about practical experiences attempting to apply new technologies can significantly increase the value of any paper.
• Is the abstract well presented and understandable? We didn’t reject any abstracts for being poorly presented. However, all other things being equal, the program committee was more enthusiastic about abstracts that were clear and well presented.

Is the abstract too long? There are many methods of trying to fit 20 pages of material into the 10 page limit on extended abstracts (reducing margins, using 9-point type on 10-point leading with double columns, etc.) They are all strongly discouraged. The page limit is to encourage authors to write abstracts that can be absorbed quickly, not to save trees, (although our request for double-sided copies of the abstracts did have this as its goal). No abstracts were rejected purely for reasons of length, but none of the accepted abstracts significantly violated the spirit of the 10 page limit; consider this a strong hint.

Several program committee members stated that after reading 10 pages worth of material, they felt free to stop reading at any point if they were not truly excited by the paper.

Don’t let the page count limit prevent you from providing figures or examples that make the paper easier to understand. The page count limit should be considered an upper bound on the number of full pages of text, exclusive of figures and examples. One program committee member disagreed and thought that the page limit should be strictly adhered to, noting that if a picture is worth 1000 words, a picture is worth more than the 200 words it displaces.

In exceptional cases, it may be appropriate to put additional material in an appendix that extends past the length limit. This is acceptable only if the extended abstract itself stands on its own without the additional material. Given their time limitations, most reviewers probably will ignore the appendix. Acceptable material for an appendix could include background material for committee members not familiar with the details of the research area and details of proofs and implementations omitted from the body of the abstract.

• Does the abstract address the obvious questions raised by the research? For example, if an abstract claims to describe ``an efficient, practical algorithm’’ for something, it should give empirical timings, asymptotic analysis or both. If the techniques described require solving a problem that is NP-Complete or undecidable in general, the abstract should discuss the difficultly of solving the problem. It may be that in practice the problems that arise in the author’s application can be solved efficiently; but if the abstract doesn’t discuss it, the program committee doesn’t know if the author is even aware of the potential problem. The program committee was sympathetic about not expecting data that ought to have been very difficult to collect. However, the committee was disappointed in several instances by abstracts that failed to report data that ought to have been easy to collect and would have answered obvious questions about the work.

Final Comments for Authors:

An ideal submission should have a reviewer intrigued within the first 5 minutes of reading, excited within 15 minutes and satisfied within 45 minutes. If your abstract fails any of these tests, it might be rejected no matter how good the research is. Committee members may spend more than 30-45 minutes on your abstract, but you shouldn’t rely on it.

Before you submit an abstract, give it to a programming languages colleague who is not familiar with the details of your research or your research area and ask him or her how much they can get out of it in less than an hour.

• Don’t overlook the importance of the introduction, figures, examples, and conclusions (and measurements if applicable) in an extended abstract.
• Remember that some program committee members, of necessity, are not experts in your area of research and that when they pick up your abstract they may have already reviewed 8 abstracts that day. Material that may take an expert in your area 5 minutes to go through might take some committee members 20 minutes or more.
• There are some types of research that are difficult to publish in a conference simply due to the amount of time and effort that would be required for the program committee members to review the abstract properly. If you can’t prepare an extended abstract of your work that can be digested and its significance understood in an hour, it may not be possible to accept your paper, no matter how good the described research. For some types of research (particularly research on new topics), it may be impossible to meet this standard, no matter how well you write. This is an unfortunate flaw in the system, and we have no remedy except to suggest that you submit your paper to a journal where more time can be taken to referee it properly.
• Please remember that we cannot give as much attention to a submission as would be given to a journal submission, and we do make mistakes. If you get back comments that suggest the program committee misunderstood your abstract, you can use that information constructively. If the program committee misunderstood your work, other readers may misunderstand it as well.
• This note has placed a lot of emphasis on the idea that an extended abstract need to be clearly written and easy to understand. Of course, whenever possible that standard should be applied to full papers as well.
• For additional advice, read the excellent article by Mark Wegman that inspired this report: ``What it’s like to be a POPL referee; or How to write an extended abstract so that it is more likely to be accepted,’’ SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 1986, pages 91-95.

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Extended Abstracts

Extended abstracts #.

This chapter provides guidance on how to structure and write an extended abstract; in particular, what sections to have and what information to convey in them.

The advice is designed to be general good practice but it is unlikely to cover all cases and there may well be good reasons to ignore parts of it depending on the nature of any given project. And you should of course follow the instructions on length and structure as given in the call for extended abstracts that you’re responding to. Furthermore, despite being phrased as “do this” or “don’t do that”, the points made below are designed to be sensible starting points–not rules that must be followed.

This chapter has drawn on numerous sources, including a thoughtful piece by William Pugh.

Much of what is relevant in an extended abstract is relevant for the whole paper too. So you should definitely read Writing Papers before reading this chapter. In particular, you should read the “Overall Contribution” section of Writing Papers as, with an extended abstract, you are similarly trying to convey to your reader what the marginal contribution is that you are making (or promising to make) relative to pre-existing knowledge and tools.

What is an extended abstract? #

An extended abstract is not simply a long abstract. An extended abstract should contain references, comparisons to related work, any key equations, and other details that you might expect to see in the research paper but not in an abstract. Think of an extended abstract as a paper printed on a postage stamp.

There are two things that make extended abstracts tricky: first, you may not have written all of the paper yet; second, you need to tell a story in a relatively small number of words and writing concisely is hard . Don’t expect this to be a quick or easy exercise—it will almost certainly be a useful exercise though.

The key to a good extended abstract is to omit anything that is not relevant to the core narrative of your work; you need to create a single, consistent story. You can also think of an extended abstract as one of those film trailers that gives away the whole story (but hopefully the reviewer will want to ‘see’ the full picture anyway!).

A typical length limit would be two pages, but you may find as many as six pages in the wild. Sometimes the limit is expressed in words or characters; typical limits might be 1000 words or 5000 characters.

A typical structure for an extended abstract might be:

Introduction: provide an overview or background of the study, as well as a statement of the problem and the objectives of the study. Cite recent relevant literature where necessary .

Methodology: report the most important elements of the methods you’re using to answer the problem. Can include equations, especially if they are key (for example, the main specification).

Results: reporting on key results only. Figures and tables can be included, but space will be limited so they must be core to the narrative.

Conclusion: this should cover any principles and generalisations that can be inferred from the results and any limitations of the work.

Acknowledgements: as in papers.

References: just those you need to support the extended abstract.

What not to put in an extended abstract #

What should you not put in an extended abstract? Here’s a list of what not to include:

future work

details of proofs or implementation that should seem plausible to reviewers

ramifications not relevant to the key ideas of the abstract

Tips for making your extended abstract strong #

The value add needs to be clear and loud from the get go: is the work a significant advance over previous work?

If the work has a specialised application, provide the context and explain how this development will push forward the field more broadly.

Don’t make it too long! Reviewers will notice if you try to fit 20 pages of material into the 2 page limit. It’s a tough communications challenge, but one that will ultimately help you sell your work.

Don’t treat the limit like a target, treat it as a limit. Everyone is busy; if you can convey the key points more concisely, reviewers will be grateful.

A reviewer is much more likely to be reading an extended abstract alongside many others at the same time, so an ideal submission will have caught their attention within a few minutes of reading.

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How to Write a Scientific Abstract

Suhasini nagda.

Nair Hospital Dental College, Mumbai, India

Scientific publications are an important source of information and knowledge in Academics, Research and development. When articles are submitted for publication, the 1st part that comes across and causes an impact on the minds of the readers is the abstract. It is a concise summary of the paper and must convey the right message. It is a quick overview of the entire paper and giving a gist of the paper and also gives us and insight into whether the paper fulfills the expectations of the reader.

Abstracts are significant parts of academic assignments and research papers. The abstract is written at the end and by this time, the author has a clear picture regarding the findings and conclusions and hence the right message can be put forward.

Types of Scientific Abstracts [ 1 ]

• Descriptive
• Informative
• Semi-structured
• Non structured

Descriptive Abstracts

This type of abstract is usually very short (50–100 words). Most descriptive abstracts have certain key parts in common. They are:

□ Background

□ Purpose

□ Particular interest/focus of paper

□ Overview of contents (not always included)

These abstracts are inconvenient in that, by not including a detailed presentation of the results, it is necessary to have access to the complete article ; they may present the results via a phrase synthesizing them, without contributing numerical or statistical data. Ultimately, these guide readers on the nature of the contents of the article, but it is necessary to read the whole manuscript to know further details [ 1 ].

Informative Abstracts

From these abstracts, you must get the essence of what your report is about, usually in about 200 words. Most informative abstracts also have key parts in common. Each of these parts might consist of 1–2 sentences. The parts include:

□ Aim or purpose of research

□ Method used

□ Findings/results

□ Conclusion

The abstracts provide accurate data on the contents of the work, especially on the results section. Informative abstracts are short scientific productions, since they follow the IMRaD structure [ 2 ] and can in fact replace the whole text, because readers extract from these the most valuable information and in many instances it is not necessary to read the complete text.

Recommendations by the CONSORT [ 3 ] declaration, in its adaptation for abstracts, offer a guide for the elaboration of an abstract of a clinical trial in structured and informative manner, using up to 400 words and briefly including the Title, Methods (participants, interventions, objective, outcomes, randomization, blind tests), Results (number of randomizations, recruitment, number of analyses, outcome, important adverse effects), and Conclusions, registry of the clinical trial and conflict of interests.

Structured Abstracts

A structured abstract has a paragraph for each section: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, and Conclusion (it may even include paragraphs for the objectives or other sections). This type of presentation is often required for informative abstracts. The CONSORT [ 3 ] declaration suggests the presentation of clinical trials with structured abstracts . Structuring an abstract permits its informative development

Semi-structured Abstract

A semi-structured abstract is written in only one paragraph, where each sentence corresponds to a section . All the sections of the article are present as in the structured abstract [ 1 ].

Non-structured Abstract

When the abstract does not present divisions between each section , and it may not even present any of them, it is a non-structured abstract. The sentences are included in a sole paragraph. This type of presentation is ideal for descriptive abstracts [ 1 ].

Key Steps to Plan Writing an Abstract [ 4 ]

• Introduction—what is the topic?
• Statement of purpose?
• Summarize why have other studies not tackled similar research questions?
• How has the research question been tackled?
• How was the research done?
• What is the key impact of the research?

Errors in the Creation of an Abstract [ 1 ]

• The abstract of an article should contribute to readers the most relevant aspects of each part of the whole manuscript, maintaining a balance between excessive detail and a vague contribution of information.
• The abstract should be written by adequately selecting the words and sentences to accomplish coherent, clear, and concise contents.
• A common defect is including adequate information like abbreviations, excessive acronyms, bibliographic references, or figures.
• The length of an abstract will be determined by the instructions to authors by each journal; an excessively lengthy abstract is the most frequent error.
• Sections should maintain coherence and order and that the conclusions must be substantiated by the results revealed and respond to the objectives proposed.
• Frequently, abstracts have poorly defined objectives, excessive numerical data and statistical results, and conclusions not based on results presented.

In short, a good abstract is one that:

• Is coherent and concise
• Covers all the essential academic elements of the full-length paper
• Contains no information not included in the paper;
• Is written in plain English and is understandable to a wider audience and discipline-specific audience;
• Uses passive structures in order to report on findings
• Uses the language of the original paper, in a more simplified form
• Usually does not include any referencing; and
• In publications such as journals, it is found at the beginning of the text, but in academic assignments, it is placed on a separate preliminary page.

A good abstract usually ensures a good article, but a bad abstract often points towards an undesirable article. Scientific abstracts are a challenge to write and for the success of our publications, careful and planned writing of the abstract is absolutely essential.