Lab Resources - Abstract

Writing an Abstract

The ability to write an abstract (technical summary) is a critical skill for a professional scientist or engineer. Writing short and descriptive paragraphs of your work is often the best way to communicate results to colleagues, coworkers and supervisors.

The abstract should be very short (4-6 sentences in total), and should be filled with details about the experiment. The main purpose of an abstract is to explain what is contained in the rest of the report. For this course, it should focus on the physics involved and the measurement taken.

Please focus on creating a very compact explanation of an experiment which answers these four questions:

  1. Purpose
    • What physics were you trying to examine?
    • Basic concept involved (i.e. Motion of a Damped Pendulum)
  2. Method
    • How was the experiment designed and performed?
    • What was measured? (i.e. the angular position)
  3. Results
    • What were your findings? You MUST include your experimental findings!
    • Display your most significant results (i.e. the frequency and dampening)
    • Include your error (i.e. 5rad/s +/- .1rad/s)
  4. Conclusion
    • Do your results agree with your understanding of theory? If not, what can be improved?

Please avoid writing any of the following in your abstract:

  • Never show any computer code (No Python please)
  • Omit any intricate details of experimental setup or theory.
  • Do not include set-up, procedure, analysis or tables of data.

Creating an abstract - Ballistic Motion

To start, please write four separate sentences explaining each of these points. By simply putting them together, you will have a good rough draft of an abstract. Here is an example for an experiment on free fall motion:

  1. This experiment investigates the effect of gravity on a freely falling mass in two dimensions.
  2. A launcher was used to shoot a ball at a constant initial velocity and the final range of impact was measured.
  3. The theoretically predicted range was found to be \(1.422 \pm 0.091 ~ m\) and the average measured range was \(1.366~m\).
  4. This result shows the kinematic equations can be successfully used to predict the motion of a heavy steel ball, even when ignoring air resistance.

Now put these sentences together and read the text. It will most likely not make much sense.

The last step (and hardest for me) is to rewrite these statements in a cohesive abstract which describes the results.

Example abstract - Oscillation of a Conical Spring

Here is another abstract for another experiment which you can use as an example of a well written abstract for this course. This abstract is a good example of how you can condense lots of information down into a short paragraph:

We present the measurement and analysis of the motion of a vertical plane spring-mass oscillator assuming simple harmonic motion. We find the spring constant k and the mass distribution constant c of the conical spring used to be \(k=8.107 \pm 0.013 N/m\) and \(c=0.307 \pm .005\) (dimensionless). Using these values, we predict the frequency of the undamped oscillator with a load mass of \(0.299 \pm 0.002~Kg\) to be \(4.824 \pm 0.021~Hz\) and measure the frequency to be \(4.8249 \pm 0.0003 ~ s^{-1}\). This study shows that undamped oscillators display a linear relationship between load mass and squared period, in agreement with theory presented.