Writing effective abstracts for academic theses and papers

¶ … worth reading simply based upon the contents of your abstract. For many academic papers, the abstract is the most widely published and read portion of the paper (Wolfe).

The content of the abstract should reflect the content of the thesis. In essence, it should provide a concise and accurate description of our thesis. It should include a clear discussion of the problem or problems that were addressed, as well as a description of methods used to address these problems. Further, the results and conclusions (if any) should be outlined within the abstract (Wolfe).

It may be helpful to think of the abstract as a short summary of the entire paper. As such, the abstract should be largely self-contained, and as such the reader should be able to get the gist of the paper through only reading the abstract. References should be included in the text of the abstract as in-text citations, but there is no need for a separate, complete list of references (Wolfe).

The abstract should be written last, after other sections of the paper have been completed. This makes it easier to summarize the paper, given that all other sections of the paper have been completed (University of Newcastle upon Tyne).