What Is An Investigatory Project?

What is abstract in science Investigatory Project?

• I need this for my Investigatory Project. Can someone help me by giving the details and an example?

• Answer:

  Did you do a science project yourself, and do you have to write an abstract, or do you just have to describe what it is? I could not quite understand this.... but I can give you a general description of what it is. An abstract is basically a summary of a research project. It will usually describe four different things: 1. the objective (background) of the study, 2. the methods used, 3. the results found, and 4. the conclusions. It is usually very short (one paragraph), so it needs to describe all these things in a very compact, yet clear way. Abstracts are usually a part of a scientific publication, usually printed at the beginning. When researchers search in databases for relevant publications, they will search for keywords, and then a number of publications will pop up (similar to a Google search). In their result screen, they will see the abstract and read them to decide if they want to read the whole paper or not. So the abstract needs to be attractive and clear. The journal that you want to publish your research in, will have certain restrictions to the size (length) of the abstract, e.g. no longer than 200 words. Some journals will ask you to break down the abstract in the four categories mentioned above, others will leave that up to the researcher. Here are some examples from real scientific publications. Don't try to understand what they are about, but see if you can recognize the 4 different parts: http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v11/n10/abs/oby2003158a.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21374529