Science Declassified: What’s an Abstract?
A new study shows…
Scientist say that doing __ can kill brain cells…
Are you using this cleaner? Science now says that 8/10 people hate when you do!
Endless chatter on the web. Every day a new breaking study is popping up on socials and the news. But where does all this science come from?
In this series we’re going to break down how to approach reading scientific papers from start to finish. My hope is that you will eventually find them just as insightful as I do. The first problem to tackle is the why. Why do we even need to read them in the first place? Shouldn’t that be left to the experts? Well I’m here to tell you whether you are an expert or not, anybody can benefit from reading and understanding scientific literature.
Often you’ll see breaking new stories and new flashes claiming extraordinary things like “a new study shows that eating chocolate can add 10 years to your life”, but when news outlets make claims like this, where does that information come from? In today’s modern world of information, the truth can often become muddled and distorted. In the example of eating chocolate, what if the news omits that the study was only done on a sample size of four people? If you harken back to your eighth-grade science class you’ll remember that the larger a sample size you have, the more sure you can be of your results. A group of four does not constitute sound science. But that doesn’t really make for a good headline does it?
With this in mind, the time to approach science with a critical eye is more important than ever. So let’s say you found a news blip making an extraordinary claim about some groundbreaking science, citing a study found in the Super Official Science Journal. So let’s take a look at it.
In this article we will be concerning ourselves with the first thing you will encounter when pulling up an article to read, the paper’s abstract. The abstract will appear as a small paragraph roughly 150–300 words preceding the intro paragraph of the paper. An abstract you can think of as the “ad” for the paper, summing up what it will be about and the claims the paper will be making. This is given to the reader as a quick and easy way to see if what you’re about to read is relevant to your interests and questions you may have.
Armed with this knowledge, let’s break it down. Any good abstract should include:
- A statement about what problem they’re looking to solve (Research Question)
- What they hope to accomplish (Objectives)
- How they attempted to solve it (Methods)
- Their Results and implications
In this example I’ll be putting myself on the chopping block with an abstract from a research article I was an author on for The Physics Teachers Journal. Did I check all four boxes in a succinct and understandable way? The hope is that without any background knowledge, in reading this abstract you can learn what to expect when reading.
An important aspect of teaching is the ability to measure the progress of your own students and make improvements to instruction. The recommendations emphasize the learning of laboratory practice and research skills such as data analysis, scientific communication, and, more specifically, the understanding of measurement uncertainty. In general, the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) has historically been used to assess student understanding of measurement uncertainty; however, little is known about the PMQ’s ability to measure learning over multiple measurements throughout a laboratory course sequence. Throughout this study, we investigated the longitudinal properties of responses from the PMQ in the context of Michigan State University’s introductory physics laboratories. Over the two semesters, we tracked students’ evolution in the types of responses given and determined two statistically significant shifts in the categories of responses.
Research Question
In this abstract we have a few sentences to hook the reader in, providing some context about it is important to measure students progress. This gives urgency to the question we propose to solve in the paper.
In general, the Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) has historically been used to assess student understanding of measurement uncertainty; however, little is known about the PMQ’s ability to measure learning over multiple measurements throughout a laboratory course sequence.
We see here that the issue is that the PMQ is an assessment tool used to measure students’ understanding of a class, but has never been used in a laboratory class over an extended period of time (semesters).
Objectives
Next, we take a look at the mechanics of how this question was solved. This should be a simple and straightforward answer consisting only of a sentence or two.
Throughout this study, we investigated the longitudinal properties of responses from the PMQ in the context of Michigan State University’s introductory physics laboratories. Over the two semesters, we tracked students’ evolution in the types of responses given…
The way that this was approached was looking at the responses given in the PMQ questionnaire and studying them in an introductory physics lab class. What this omits however, is the background explanation of what a longitudinal study is. In this case we studied the same students’ responses over two semesters and tracked how their answers changed.
Results
In the final sentence of the paper, what was accomplished should be clearly stated.
Over the two semesters, we tracked students’ evolution in the types of responses given and determined two statistically significant shifts in the categories of responses.
Here we see that after tracking the students across two semesters, there were two shifts in the data that were significant enough to merit note.
Once you break it all down, approaching a scientific paper is simple. Information is power, and with scientific literacy at your side, the wool is never pulled over your eyes. It might be boring, as I admit it occasionally is, but with the right tools in your belt you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what fascinating science lies just beneath the abstract.
Happy reading.
