great well thanks for being here good to see so many people um so i'm dr kurzer kenden kerzer i am uh the associate director of undergraduate writing across the curriculum for the university writing program so i provide a lot of outreach work with writing experience classes and helping instructors understand how to ins you know implement writing effectively in their nursing classes and their chemistry classes and all all those kinds of things and so here we're going to be talking about writing abstracts preparing for the undergraduate research conference and so thanks to my colleague lisa bender and lisa sperver who've laid the foundation with the work here and i just adapted it so we'll start off talking a little bit about what an abstract is it's a summary of a research study or other original contribution that highlights its major points while concisely describing a scope and the key here is original contribution so where a lot of students tend to go wrong when i teach i teach a lot of upper division stem writing classes and so a lot of research papers and so a lot of students start writing their abstract and they do it first and they write the abstract as if it's an introduction with a lot of background kind of literature review content in there and that's not the focus of this a good abstract is actually really mostly about the stuff after all that it's it's a teeny bit methodology stuff but it's mostly results and kind of why the results actually matter it's mainly that original content and so we're going to hit that a whole lot you'll see that a lot come up but so so it's generally best practices to start writing the abstract after you have the rest of your presentation or whatever it is put together not always doable though of course uh usually they're about 150 to 200 words for the undergraduate research conference it's a firm 200 words don't submit anything else for that it will be cut off beyond 200 words and then linguistic features the kinds of words and the kinds of language that you use may vary a little bit according to the field and kind of purpose of your project so we'll talk about those a little bit more so let's first think a little bit about this i'm going to make you interact i know you can either chime up unmute yourself or in the chat which i will be able to see here momentarily okay so go ahead and chat what is the purpose of an abstract either share feel free to comment raise your hand i don't really care there's not that many of us and i'm not all that formal when it comes to zoom anyway explain your work to someone else who may be unfamiliar okay i like that i like that is it henna jenna jenna yeah never know perfect thank you other thoughts a brief summary about what your research is about but what's the purpose of it i mean that's a summary yeah you're explaining your work but i guess think about this who reads them and how are they used like what what what do we do why do we have an abstract here well scholars will read um like an abstract to see if it's relevant to their research or a student might read it to see if it's relevant to the research because if your research paper is like 30 pages and your abstract is like irrelevant to someone's research they're not going to even take the time to take your research okay so so you nailed it right like the whole point of an abstract is to allow an audience to decide if they're actually going to read it or not which makes some kind of high stakes right like if you have a poorly written abstract people aren't even going to be engaging with your work what about for a conference like this what's the context there who's reading them and why i mean i guess you could say like your peers are reading them to see which ones they want to go to or which ones are interesting to them because you're all like they're present they're being presented as opposed to like a journal article that you can access at any time at a conference it's like now or never so they're trying to figure out which ones they want to go to yeah yeah so honestly i think for a conference it's perhaps an it's even more high stakes like you just said jenna right that um if you're going to get an audience at all you have to have an abstract that's going to actually bring them in and make them want to you know listen to your presentation so they're actually fairly high stakes for something that's you know pretty short can be pretty straightforward in many contexts to write because the audience you're trying to get an audience invested you're trying to get them to actually attend and read and all that fun stuff questions or reactions there okay so let's talk a little bit about how so like we said they are summaries um little mini texts although again the whole point of an abstract is not to summarize the whole thing it's to really focus in on that original contribution that's what we want to see we want to make sure that our original contribution is portrayed to the audience so that they get a good sense of that and like we said there right it's a screening device for readers and conference attendees i'm only going to attend the conference sessions that have abstracts that seem to resonate with me based on my interests based on my current research based on things that i want to learn about and so they really should be well written and clear about you know here's what i'm actually going to be talking about so that the attendees actually are interested in going same kind of thing with readers right for articles preview it helps the readers understand what to expect when they actually read the article and then they're also helpful for indexing right so different abstracts are used to help editors online databases can can help connect everything so they're pretty important kind of high stakes so for the undergraduate research conference like we said it's 150 to 200 word limit make sure we're sticking to that it's a lay audience people uc davis are educated and intelligent people but they may not really understand your topic um which means we have to make sure that we're defining our terms we're not throwing in jargon and assuming that the audience gets it uh so so it's kind it's it's it can be challenging to write abstracts well especially because we're asking a whole lot of you in no more than 200 words like they're really challenging to write well promissory or preliminary abstracts are acceptable especially for a conference like this this basically means you can submit abstracts where you don't have the research or the project done you will or you may not you can even go to present the conference and say hey this is where we are in this particular project what do you think there's no problem no issues with that um and so you just want to make sure that you're presenting your work not as if it was already done and you're just kind of faking the results but you're using things like i expect that we'll find or anticipated results include um to help get at that and we'll talk more about that momentarily there's only one abstract submission per person and then i don't need the question mark here you don't need citations for this conference for other conferences you may and there's nothing wrong necessarily with including citations in abstracts they just tend to they they contribute to wordiness so you don't need to worry about it here you're really just focusing in on the main ideas some other tips for this context in particular make sure that you're working with your professor while you're drafting the abstract you'll want to make sure that you um that the professor needs to sign off on it and so make sure that you're involving the professor at you know several points during the drafting stage especially at the end to say hey look this is what i'm submitting do you approve before you actually go through the hassle of doing it like i said avoid technical jargon you're aiming this for a general audience and defining terms when you're using an acronym for example you'll want to make sure that you're providing the full term prior to referring to it by the acronym so it looks something just like this ultra low sulfur diesel and then ulsd in parentheses a lot of times students do the reverse but it should be this way just so you know cut excess words if you find yourself being unsure of how to actually do that you can always um there's something called the paramedic method and purdue's online writing lab the owl has some resources on there that can be really helpful things like looking at prepositions and empty heads things that don't actually contain real meaning but are just there for grammatical structure and i'd be happy to talk more about that if you're interested but we'll save that for the end and then the website has some nice um helpful tips there too so refer to those so what actually gets into the abstract so i know i said you're focused on your original contribution you do need to frame it a little bit so there'll be a brief again brief is the key here background introduction kind of research context what do we currently know about the topic and why is it important even though why is it important you can save that for implications and stuff so it's it's but it's you want this to be really brief then you present your research purpose what is the study about um yeah we can put that link in i can do it really quick since i had it there sorry one second all right there's the link so you're presenting your research purpose uh what is the study actually about the methods materials subject procedures you know kind of the nitty-gritty details you don't need to include a whole lot of specific details but at least um a basic overview is really helpful to help lend your presentation some reliability right it says i actually know what i'm talking about if my materials are solid how was the study or the project done results and findings what was discovered and again here if it's if it's a promissory if it's anticipatory you can say this is what i think we'll find and then you really want some meat of discussion implications why does this matter what do the findings mean and so really in terms of bulk what what you want the majority of your space should be devoted to these last three and many students tend to devote way too much space to the first one so just so you know some other ways to think this think about this what did you do why did you do it how did you do it what have you learned and what does it mean what's the so what and so notice that these questions are really about your particular project you're not bringing in too much background so so it could look something like this right i've got basically this background significant knowledge gaps exist in x topic in order to fill these gaps an experiment has been developed to assess so that's the second point right here's the research purpose and then in this experimental phase of this assessment i am investigating sure i can go back so looking at these questions there are you good now jenna yeah thank you okay no worries then so here's the methodology portion of it and here's what we think we'll find here and notice this initial finding so this means that it's and with this experimental phase stuff right this is basically saying this is pretty preliminary and people reading this will know that it's preliminary and they'll expect that when they're coming in so here we've got some results content and then this discussion stuff at the end questions about that okay so some other things to consider what type of background do general readers and other researchers need this is where some definitions might come in right we'll make sure that we're that we're in defining our terms and kind of setting up framing the work that we're doing in the abstract which verb tenses are used are the verbs actually descriptive this will be a little bit different in different disciplines a lot of stem contexts still heavily rely on passive voice whereas other disciplines don't and even in stem context passive voice tends to be falling out of favor because it's wordy it doesn't really contribute that much are there citations or references to previous research you're not going to be including citations for this one but you still want to make it clear to the audience that what you're proposing in your abstract is grounded in reality in academic contexts and so having just some references that that make it clear that you know what you're talking about is is important does the abstract use i or we typically i recommend that it should right you're presenting work that you're actually doing there's no need to kind of beat around the bush and say the researcher or um use passive voice exclusively it's a lot more clearer and concise to use pronouns like this and so typically especially for a conference like this no problem using ir we and then are you defining your acronyms or abbreviations so keep those things in mind some opening strategies so one strategy could be just simply starting with a real world phenomenon with standard practice something that is basically common knowledge at least in your discipline things like corporate taxation rates vary around the world or economists have long been interested in x right basically something that just says hey this is what we're actually going to be talking about this is the topic strategy b could be starting with a purpose or an objective something like the aim of the study is to examine x you can kind of jump into it pretty quickly because the whole point of the abstract is to actually highlight your stuff there and then you might see a little bit of background built into that portion there another strategy could be starting with present researcher action an example could be we analyze corporate taxation returns before and after the introduction of the new tax rules right so basically again saying here's what the researchers are actually doing with this study that's represented by the abstract starting with a problem or an uncertainty kind of building back out to this background this more general background the relationship between corporate taxation and corporate strategy remains unclear right so it's just something a little bit more general but it's still pretty brief and then you move straight into your particular project so summarize those kinds of things think about what you did why did you do it how did you do it what have you learned and what does that mean and get into that so now we're going to apply it i have a handout that i've got the link for google doc um yeah just a second let me copy this into the go this google doc into the chat and then i'll bring that back up so um for this i've got several um several abstracts from previous conferences here you you shouldn't you won't be able to edit it but you can copy and paste out the content into a new document and what i'd like you to do is basically identify the different stuff in those and so i'll go back to that slide in just a second justin um but so in the meantime pick one of them we've got one about um biodiesel we've got an art history one about a monet painting we've got one about bpa and then we've got one about latino students in higher education contexts and so pick one that seems most interesting to you um or resonates most in terms of your particular program and then look at highlighting the background the present research for purpose the materials method subjects procedures results and findings and discussions um sound good okay and then so i'll bring it back up oh what to do here in a minute so this is the strategy a starting with a real world phenomenon are you good justin yep no worries okay so back to this go ahead and we'll take about four minutes to let you look through yours and then we'll talk about them okay can you go to strategy b yep thank you so much no worries perfect i know i hit through those pretty quickly so again you're just you're highlighting in different colors the background the present research purpose the methods material subjects the results and findings and the discussion conclusions implications content in one of the sample abstracts that i sent you or that i shared with you another minute or so once you're finished if you want to give me a heads up thumbs up or drop in the chat so jenna's done math is done another minute still justin's okay why don't we start talking about them make sure we can get through that okay um did anybody do this the biodiesel one give me a raise your hand if you did no one huh this is kind of a fun one i'll walk you through this one so this is what i indicated so i saw this first sentence as being background [Music] um the second sentence is really showing in order to fill these gaps right we're basically saying this is the experiment that we're doing um and then we've got methodologies section here it's fairly extensive but not overly long uh and then we've got initial findings here so this is a nice one to show kind of this preliminary abstract approach and then it ends with this is why this is the most important this is why this is important i mean it could be a little bit more clear right like what it what exactly does this matter but i'm nitpicking um because that's what i do in my classes so this one's pretty well balanced right there's not an overly large chunk of background it's mainly like we said it's mainly focusing on you know points three four and five and so this isn't too this isn't too shabby this isn't too shabby did anybody do the the art history one yeah this is one that i did okay do you want to walk us through what you found yeah so i was kind of a bit confused i really actually liked this abstract i think um the background and influence is starting with um painted during and after world war one these paintings were donated to the french government by monet himself all the way up until um horrors of war i thought was like the background in context and then the research and purpose um i didn't really i honestly could be completely wrong i didn't really find that but i also think i um mixed that one up with the um results and findings which is when the author says um monet or the painter was well aware of his increasing age and then all the way until the end of the thing which is patriotic i didn't really find any i mean i also thought the results findings in discussion conclusion were very similar in this abstract i didn't really find any methods materials or subject procedures so i kind of think two four and five were just done in this completely done in the second half of the abstract yeah so this one i think is it's an interesting one which is why i like it i mean it's also discipline specific right so an art history one is it's not going to be as research focused because it's not like there's a research project presented perhaps but there still should be some kind of original something and i think you're absolutely right that this one's a challenging one to see because a lot of it just doesn't exist this is actually how i'd classify it all of this first part is really just background about the painting and why it's important with art history i mean you're gonna get some more of that because like like i said there's not like you're conducting an experiment you're just presenting a new kind of original perspective or paradigm regarding the artwork in this case but and so so it it might have a little bit more background than in other contexts but i would argue that this is excessive right that you could cut this introduction down by half even by two-thirds and it would still be effective and you'd actually be more effective as far as an abstract by really building these later parts like why does this matter what like yes it's interesting that the paint the paintings were intensely personal project rather than patriotic but what are you actually going to be telling us about that that's new that's original and so really for me where this one comes up short is the fact that it doesn't do nearly enough to actually say here's why this matters here's my new original contribution that's going to bring somebody in does that make sense yeah it does that's kind of what i was thinking too i just i didn't really know if that was indeed correct you're right on you're right on now i will say all that and still say that i got this abstract from the website this was an accepted abstract right so keep in mind kind of the level of what we're expecting you turn in an abstract and as long as it's reasonably you know your students we're expecting student work with a conference like this um just be aware that if you're turning in something like this it'll be a lot harder for the audience to really feel like they're invested in attending your session i would suspect that that a that a session like this unless you've got somebody who's really really obsessed with monet's work and is like i go to anything possible you're not gonna see the attendance that you might like comments or questions about this one i actually i don't wanna uh go against what you said but i actually kind of liked the abstract only because i mean it may be that i'm more letters than science oriented so like this is kind of like up my alley but i actually i i do think there are definitely some issues with it particularly the fact that the entire blue is half the abstract i do think that like that's a lot um i i just i liked i wish i would have seen a bit more of the yellow and green because i really think that's the most interesting part of like what the abstract is about but i do think it's it's really interesting i just wish there was a little bit more of like what they had found yeah no i i mean i absolutely agree i think the topic's certainly interesting and i think it's it's clear like it's well written and they clearly devoted a lot of effort to it just because it missed that the original contribution just isn't explicitly discussed enough to make me feel like i'm confident spending time in a session like this is going to result in me getting some new insights i would just suspect with something like this that the presentation could basically equal that there would be you know 65 of it would be this background stuff rather than the meat of what we want to see being that original stuff does that make sense i guess i have a follow-up question to that if you're doing an abstract and you assume that your audience doesn't know anything about your topic how much background then should you give even if you're presenting or have a poster like if that's the case in an abstract if you're if you're doing something like science-y related or even letters in science like how do you balance the background and then the actual work it's really tough honestly it really is tough abstracts are frankly kind of impossible to perfect you can't there isn't such a thing as a perfect abstract because the space limitations just don't allow it what i would say is think critically and really deliberately about the balance um [Music] you want to like i said i mean in an so an academic audience like you'd see at the undergraduate research conference at uc davis right we're academically minded and so we're really interested with what's cutting edge i tend to think of this as in terms of kind of a pyramid there's all the research that's ever been done on a particular topic and you've got the foundation the biggest piece there's dozens of different studies and they're 20 or 30 years old that lay this foundation and it's important stuff but it's not super crucial right now and as it gets as you build the pyramid you've got more and more current things and this little piece at the top is the stuff that's super current it's forward thinking it's the original stuff that and that's the stuff that people really want to see and so if you're relying on all the stuff underneath it too much then it's gonna feel like a wikipedia article where it's just it's it's basic stuff that is assumed to be the case does that make sense yeah actually the pyramid method is a really good point thank you so much okay okay so so you want and so just thinking about the audience here they're going to be really interested in that peak part and so you want to provide enough stuff from the bottom that's saying look i'm building this pyramid on a foundation that's legit but you do it kind of really really concisely and tightly so that you're not detracting from the other part but like i said it's really tough it's frankly impossible to do to do really well um so don't be overly harsh on yourself just think about trying to get the balance that's like this the balance is more like this going to there's still this kind of foundation it's there it's just not detracting from the from the more important stuff you've got to prioritize with abstracts other questions there okay anybody look at the bpa one uh yeah i did do you mind telling us a little bit about what you what you found um yeah sure um so this one i mean in general like based on what i was reading it seems like they also haven't done the they carried out their study so i um so i found that there was like um a little bit more background than i guess what like what you said they would typically want to see so i got from obviously from the beginning to a sentence substantial adverse effects and fetal growth um to the end of that sentence that was where i found the background ended okay and then the next section um i got from the next sentence up until actually yeah just that sentence that really long sentence to low exposure levels yep it's a long sentence yeah um and then for the methods and materials i got um just again the next sentence and then for the um i forgot what the next section was for uh results and findings since they it seems like they don't have actual results i haven't done it yet um just a really short sentence we are interested in um and then i just got that the final sentence was the um the discussion and talking about the implications of what their findings could possibly come out to be okay yeah i would i would agree i would agree largely um yeah so i think i think like you said justin i think it's a little a little background heavy um and it would be nice yes it is a preliminary one so we certainly understand why [Music] there's not more here but it would be nice to at least allude to some additional stuff that again looking at that peak of that pyramid that's the stuff that's going to bring people in but yeah solid could be a little stronger but again really solid questions or comments about this one yeah thank you justin and who looked at the latina students in higher education or i did are you comfortable walking us through what you found um sure so i felt that the first two sentences were kind of like the background introduction about like latina latinas in higher education and like their composition throughout like different systems um and then um about the study was the third sentence so this study examines the social cultural as well as economic challenges that they face okay and then the study was done [Music] by interviewing i think it was 10 women so they explained that in the next sentence um and then lastly what was discovered it's not like super explicit but they do mention like um three factors that they feel take a big part of their uh decision making when they decide to go to college yeah with the location and the interdependence with family and then lastly the last sentence doesn't really go into what the findings mean but i think it's still like a conclusion sentence because they hope i think that the reader will like read the rest of the paper to see like those reasons are important yeah yeah so this is a fairly common abstract kind of framework here at the end we're ending with we're going to talk about why this matters right and yeah that's a lot to bring in and so yeah i think you hit it right on the head um let's see this to juliana so yeah yeah um i might recommend being a little bit more concise with this part here if at all possible just to allow a little teensy bit more development of that stuff at the end but yeah otherwise i think it's a really well written abstract that provides some you know there's some specific details in there that tell you exactly what they did and what they found and why it matters so yeah any questions or comments about that one okay so there's the the link again which is in the chat too but so we've got a couple of minutes we've got about 12 minutes do i'm happy to if you any of you happen to have an abstract started that you'd like us to look at we could certainly do something like that or we could talk through some possibilities if you're like i've got something more basic um how do you want to proceed when we meet in person this is where i have you actually bring out stuff and we actually i circulate and we talk about how to make it tighter but i don't know where you are in the research process we wanted to contact you later would that be a thing we could do once we have a more formalized abstract it certainly could be your first step should be with your professor just because they're the ones that actually have to approve it um so so i would contact them make sure that you're getting the help there like you need but then i'd be happy to provide some additional i mean honestly your professors have been doing these for years so they're you'll probably get the help that you need there but i'd be happy to look at something after that thank you yeah i'd like to address the point that dr cruiser just mentioned for our conference specifically the only reason why a student would be turned away is if we reach capacity and we don't have any more room to take students or if a faculty member rejects the abstract and if a faculty rejects the abstract the number one reason why a faculty member will reject an abstract is because the student did not check in with them first to review the abstract so them seeing it through a submission is the first time they're seeing it if your abstract does get rejected as part of our conference what happens is your abstract will go back into the save status and then you as the student will be able to log back in and make the adjustments that your faculty sponsor wants you to make hit resubmit and then your faculty member will be able to reapprove re-review and approve your abstract so don't be alarmed if you get rejected if you do get rejected check in with your faculty member first and talk to them and then make the adjustments needed and resubmit and we can always help you through that process as well see how can we try to prevent getting rejected due to space is it based on the date of approval very good question this year since we are returning to an in-campus i mean sorry an in-person conference we are going to have space limitations because of requirements per copied you know the university copied policy so uh getting rejected due to space if you want to guarantee your spot into our conference in terms of space be sure to apply by the priority deadline to conference which is february 9th at 11 59 pm if you apply by february 9th you are guaranteed a spot in our conference if we reach the final deadline of february 16 but if we reach capacity prior to february 16th we will close a registration once we reach capacity or uh if once february 16th passes whichever comes first does it only need to be approved by the pi or those faculty members involved when you register for the conference you will be asked to input your faculty sponsors information your abstract review will go to that faculty member for review if you have more than one faculty sponsor please check in with your faculty sponsors to see who you would like who needs to be listed because you only are going to be able to list one faculty sponsor is there ever an opportunity to edit the abstract after it's submitted great question claire so after it is submitted the only way to uh edit your abstract is for it to be rejected by your faculty member and so if there is edits that need to be done after it's been approved let's say you submitted a promissory abstract and now you have a more specific abstract we can replace that for you manually it just really depends on the time in which you make that request because if it's closer to conference then it's probably not going to happen because we're going to get our abstract books already published and all that good stuff so the sooner the better uh can you submit multiple abstracts we are planning for an in-person conference and due to space capacity and to give everyone a fair chance to get a spot in our conference we are not allowing students to submit more than one abstract however if we do have to pivot to an online conference we may be able to allow students to submit you know to present more than once because online our capacity issues don't exist no you certainly don't have to have the findings ready when you're writing the abstract you can write a preliminary and that's where you would basically just say here's what i expect we would find and just make sure it's clear i sometimes have students who try to like they're not trying to falsify their results or anything they just think it's better to present research as if it's already been done even if they haven't done it and don't do that just make it clear that it's this is what we expect to find and here's why we think it'll matter if that's what we do find that is actually very very common to present research that way even faculty do it now it's very common to present research that way so um you would be following the practices in in the academy the same way so absolutely true i've done it several times right i mean it happens all the time and it's actually really nice to present something that's in progress to a bunch of people because then they're like yeah here's what you need to think of that you didn't and like did you consider this oh i did not that's a really good idea let's build that into the study a little bit more so yeah it's absolutely acceptable other questions no i mean you don't nobody is going to be like oh you didn't you're presenting something that you didn't have findings for yet no it's i mean it's certainly acceptable it's kind of nice to have at least something preliminary even even if you're just even if you're just saying this is a really rough analysis of my interview data i've only done three interviews but here's some stuff that we're actually finding now that's kind of nice but again nobody's gonna be like where are your results just expect at that point you would expect it's more a lot more about presenting the work in process and talking about methodology in more detail and then really trying to get feedback on what you're doing and see about if the audience has ways to strengthen it while you're working on the project can i use my mic to it's going to take a while for me to check this out please okay um so for my abstract i think i have like a basic like methodology but i'm thinking that i might want to like add more stuff that i look at so is it necessary for me to have it in the abstract for me to like talk about it during the conference no i mean it's pretty common too to have things shift and adjust between the abstract submission time and what you actually present on um i mean i think in those in those instances where i've done something like that i'll frequently preface my presentation with while this is what my abstract said this is where things ended up going and why i made these changes at the beginning of the presentation just so the audience doesn't feel duped you can be like okay if if if i brought you here under false pretenses go to something else that you're more interested in um but things evolve all the time and researchers understand that so do your best with what you have now and then it'll be totally okay to adjust good question other questions that's a good question e i don't know if you've done that in the past no bring it on yeah no don't be sorry for the questions that's what we're here for so we um you know as long as you're okay with the canon we will post um powerpoint slides and recordings for these presentations at the very least we will uh post the recording and then we leave it up to the presenter on whether they're comfortable with us submitting uh slides yeah email me and i'll send you a pdf of them at least so perfect that's a good opportunity getting some good research experience in that's really nice especially if you're looking at grad school um i regularly tell my undergrads one of the main things that people are looking for and at the graduate admissions side is students who have research experience because it means that they need to be handheld a lot less through graduate research so that's that's a really good thing to do is to get something and some presentation research writing experience that that's that's really valuable anything else we definitely want to thank you kenden for always being a partner in these workshops um our students always get a lot out of these workshops whether they're presented at our conference or presenting at another conference so thank you for your um continued uh partnership on this and for the drop-in eva we are working on scheduling those um this quarter so we will check back to our website for that so i'm going to stop the record