Hello everyone! Week 4 already, which means we’ve gotten back into the swing of things, with some preparing for midterms and tests even. Good luck to those students!
The Surgical Society will be hosting their annual conference this semester and this conference is accepting presenters, who can be students from 3rd year and up, to present a surgical case. The date of the conference is yet to be determined but expected to be sometime between the end of March and the beginning of April.
In preparation for this, applications are currently being accepted and to apply, you need to submit an abstract of your presentation by the 1st week of March. This means interested students have approximately a week and some to prepare.
To help, I have prepared a small guideline on what an abstract is and how best to present something like this. Let’s dive in!
What’s an Abstract?
An abstract is a short summary of a completed research paper. The goal of an abstract is to convey the aim, methods and results of your work. After reading an abstract, your reader should be able to understand the general concept of your research work and can then decided whether or not to get into the full text.
It can be extremely helpful for anyone researching to decide whether or not an article is in the scope of their own research without reading the entire paper.
Typically the abstract is the last part of your paper or article you write when you have a thorough understanding of your research and can compress it into a few sentences that still hold the most basic information of the work.
What Formats Can I Use?
There are two ways that the abstract can be written: unstructured, where you can have it as one block of text or structured, where it is broken up into short sections. Journals that publish research papers usually have a specification for what format you take. In our case, the Surgical Society has not specified what exactly they expect of the abstract, so I would suggest discussing it with your consulting doctor/surgeon.
What Information Do I Include?
The kind of abstract you write can differ based on the type of research paper. For the conference, you are likely making case report-style presentations. There are the Case Report (CARE) guidelines which I suggest you check out here, not just for abstract writing but also for preparing your presentation and any future research papers.
That being said, an article from the AACN CCN Journal (2017) listed 4 necessary elements of case-report abstracts, regardless of whether the abstract is structured or not:
- Introduction: The case’s significance.
- Clinical findings: Patient’s main complaints and the most important clinical findings.
- Diagnoses, interventions, and patient outcomes.
- Conclusions: Key lessons from this case.
We can take a look at the abstracts for two published papers- one structured and one unstructured, to have an idea of what this means.
And it’s as easy as that.
What Should the Word Limit Be?
Once again, we have no specifications from the PTE Surgical Society on their expectations. Most journals have recommendations of an average of 150-300 words. In the examples above, the structured format has 13 sentences and 289 words, headings included. The unstructured format has 8 sentences and 152 words, keywords included. So these both fall within the 150-300 word limit.
Further Tips
When writing the abstract, imagine your target reader- a busy person, tired from long hours of reading multiple papers before coming across yours, perhaps with limited knowledge of your field of research.
You have a minute, maybe less to sell the paper to the reader. We can’t do abbreviations, typographical or grammatical errors.
This is the first contact your reader will have with your work and the quality of the abstract will essentially give an idea of what to expect in terms of the quality of the rest of the research paper. So you need to make it good.
That being said, I hope that this has been helpful and I wish the presenter applicants the best of luck as they prepare towards the conference. If you would like to participate in the conference as a presenter, you might not be too late. You can reach out to anyone of the distinguished surgeons at our PTE clinics to ask for an interesting case. For those of you who have connections with hospitals back in your home countries, you can request cases from there. The deadline to submit your abstract is the first week of March, so get moving!
Have a great week ahead everyone!
Author’s note: All advice provided in this article does not represent professional expertise in any field.