Abstract Project

How did we obtain the final repertoire of useful phrases?

1. Selecting up to five journals referring to the research field of each project team member (individual work). Selection criteria:

• Sciences: Impact Factor (IF) as high as possible
• Humanities: Ministerial list, supervisors' experience, own experience

2. Choosing abstracts from selected journals (individual work).
Selection criteria:

• 10 interesting abstracts, which show important results
• length of selected abstracts - between 50 and 350 words,
• language of selected abstract - neutral and formal

3. Content analysis (individual work).

3a. Pilot Study
A pilot study (carried out by two team members on ten abstracts in Biology and Psychology) showed that most abstracts consist of sections, which can be described under the following subheading: Background, Aim/Purpose, Method and Materials, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Others. Consequently, the following categories were accepted for an individual analysis of ten abstracts preselected by each member of the project group.

3b. Selecting the categories for the analysis of personal collection of abstracts

• Background
• Purpose
• Method & Materials
• Results
• Conclusions
• Miscellaneous

Additionally, it has been recommended:

• sorting out phrases in each category by their frequency of appearance (without a statistical analysis due to a small number of abstracts -10 per a group member)
• analyzing the context of a given phrase
• providing an example of the context with a phrase under discussion
• deleting repetitive phrases (so as to obtain non-repetitive examples of a given phrase in its context)

4. Merging the results of individual analysis (prepared in tables) into bigger tables containing the results
of 4 -5 persons representing similar field of research (group work online).

• selecting group leaders (5 persons)
• allocating tasks to group members:

1. sorting phrases by categories (see point 3)

2. considering the frequency of appearance

3. analyzing grammatical structure of a given phrase

4. providing examples

5. deleting repetitive phrases and examples

• collecting the results of the analysis from each group member

5. Merging the results of group work (see task 4) into final repertoire of useful phrases (deleting repetitive phrases and examples).