1. clock
  2. There once was an Editor of FASEB....

There once was an Editor of FASEB....

By clock on August 1, 2008.

....who likes limericks.

His article - Writing Science: The Abstract is Poetry, the Paper is Prose - makes me wish to have something to submit to FASEB just so I could submit the Abstract in the actual form of a limerick. And see what the Editor says.

I actually like it when a paper starts with a short verse. Or a good quote (that's how I started collecting interesting quotes).

But to include controls in the Abstract? That's insane! There is no way to even mention all seventeen experiments in the abstract, let alone the details of materials and methods, even less to bother with controls, when the limit is 250 (or in best cases 500) words.

The Abstract gives the basic gist ("in a series of experiments we show that X is Y") - it is not the place for details. And almost never needs to have any actual numbers in it (especially not stats, e.g., p-values). That is what the paper is for. Abstract is like a mini-press-release, or advertisement, designed to draw you in, not repel. To provoke you to read the rest of the paper in order to see if the exorbitant claim made in the Abstract is actually supported by data. If everything is in the Abstract, why write the rest of the paper just to duplicate all the information?

Tags
Science Practice

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