Last year (2019) was busy for ol’ McCaslin. I didn’t have much luck with my R1 tenure-track faculty applications in the 2018-2019 cycle, so I made a conscious effort to get in front of as many people at as many conferences as possible. In all this, I was writing conference abstracts constantly, trying to sell my research to scientific conference organizers. Many conferences, such as select Gordon Research Conferences (GRC), choose a few students and postdocs to highlight their work by giving short talks (10-20 minutes). These individuals are generally selected from the pool of poster abstracts and act as a poster preview. Other conferences, such as American Chemical Society (ACS) meetings put out calls for abstracts on certain topics and professors, students, and postdocs compete for an oral presentation. In the year 2019, I submitted abstracts competing for oral presentations at 6 different meetings (GRC Gaseous Ions, ACS Orlando, International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy, Dynamics of Molecular Collisions, the Penn Conference for Theoretical Chemistry, and ACS San Diego) and was chosen to give an oral presentation at 5/6 of these meetings. I even snuck in another talk at Faraday Discussions: Advances in Ion Spectroscopy, which has looser rules for who can contribute. In my time as a PhD student and postdoc, I scoured the web searching for tips on writing punchy abstracts that immediately catch the attention of the organizers and get you selected. I didn’t find much on this matter, so I looked at the abstracts that were selected and did some trial and error to find ways to make my abstracts stand out. Here’s what I’ve found:
- It’s all about the title!
Conference organizers have to read dozens and sometimes hundreds of abstracts looking to identify interesting work to showcase. This means that they are definitely not reading every word that you write and mostly stopping after the title and first few sentences. When organizers can’t identify who is working on interesting topics from the titles, they often default to choosing students and postdocs who work in their field on projects close to their hearts. People can also default to choosing select students and postdocs from big players in the field. Whether you’re working with a big name or not, let’s break the cycle of bad conference abstracts!
Writing good titles is crucial to tell the organizers and other members of the conference what you did and why it’s solving an interesting and/or important problem. Many people default to just the “what” and forget that conference organizers generally aren’t experts on your project and don’t have any context on why you’re working on that project.
I personally like the following structure for abstract titles (note: this advice does not necessarily translate to titles of papers, which may have more regulation on what you can say):
Why your project is interesting/important: what you did
An example of this is:
“Uncovering a New Class of Reactions in the Atmosphere: Mechanisms and Dynamics of the Reactions of N2O5 with Seawater”
The colon between the why and what is, of course, not necessary, but can encourage the readers to want more. Using the words “new” and “first” can be a bit risky, especially for scientific papers, but conference abstracts are generally a bit more relaxed about such things. My opinion is that one should try to sell one’s research as much as possible. If you did a thorough search in the literature and talked to the community and people agree that what you’ve done is novel, you’re absolutely allowed to say that you did something important, especially in a conference setting.
2. Structuring the body of the abstract
As I discussed in section 1, this is only going to be read by conference attendees if they get interested in your work through the title. Therefore, you can’t skip writing clearly and professionally about why your work is impactful and specifically what you did. Generally, I structure my abstracts in the following way.
2-3 sentences giving context for why you’re interested in a certain system
4-7 sentences summarizing your major findings, emphasizing surprising results
The abstract can briefly (in a few words) mention which techniques were used in the study, but should focus (again) on the why and what. I tend to write abstracts that are a third to half a page (12 pt, single spaced, 1 in margins) and I’ll cite 1-3 studies from my own research group that can guide the readers to the earlier studies. Another benefit to including journal citations is that readers will be able to identify the field from the journal titles. Some people choose to include summary or “table of contents” figures in their abstracts and I’m all for it. This is a great visual tool that under-used in abstracts.
All in all, keep conference abstracts fun and punchy by succinctly sticking to the why and what. Happy conferencing!