Abstract abstracts and other abstractions
Paul R. Krausman, Allison S. Cox, Anna C. S. Knipps · Journal of Wildlife Management · 2016
The format for the Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM) follows the general guidelines of other science-based journals.In the early stages of scientific publication, many manuscripts were descriptive and did not have specific formats.Louis Pasteur was the first to actually use an introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) in his writing in the 1800s (Day 1989), but it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that IMRAD started to appear regularly in scientific papers (Wu 2011).The Journal began using IMRAD in the 1960s, as did most scientific journals with some modifications (Sollaci and Pereira 2004).The IMRAD style gave form to scientific papers and was widely accepted because it presents a consistent framework for the organization of scientific manuscripts by organizing the key components of research (Wu 2011).As organizational and retrieval systems for scientific papers became more important and increased, different methods of locating and cataloguing data were developed.This led to the introduction of the abstract in scientific writing.The purpose of abstracts was to quickly convey necessary information to editors and readers (Nakayama et al. 2005) and came into use with JWM in 1963 when Thomas G. Scott, Editor-in-Chief, replaced the summary with an abstract.Initially the abstract was a brief statement of the conclusion of the results of the manuscript but is now part of the IMRAD system as are key words, acknowledgments, and literature cited (Wu 2011).Abstracts generally follow the IMRAD format (Sollaci and Pereira 2004) and are more than a summary of the conclusions of studies.Indeed, abstracts present information on the background for the work, objectives, methods, results, conclusions, and utility of the work (Wu 2011).Structured abstracts that follow this organization are more informative, readable, and clearer than unstructured abstracts; they are concise and to the point (Hartley 2003).Also, structured abstracts are better than titles in relaying information (Resnick 1961) and for retrieving information (Fidel 1986a, b;Trawi nski 1989).Abstracts in JWM serve the purpose of manuscript summary by condensing the study into 1 paragraph (1 line/page of manuscript text including Literature Cited or 1 line/2 pages for notes).There are 5 parts to a structured abstract.The abstract should begin with a statement of the problem (background) followed by the objective of the study or the hypothesis studied with an explanation of why it is important.The third part of the abstract briefly states the methods used and where and when the study was conducted.This should be followed by important results that support or do not support your hypothesis.Finally, the abstract should state the use of your