Creating Abstracts 

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association
POR Reference BF76.7 .P83 2001
GOR Reference  BF76.7 .P83 2001

Writing empirical research reports : a basic guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences
POR Stacks  LB2369 .P97 2007

How to succeed in academics
POR Stacks  LB2331.7 .M34 2000

Examples of Research Abstracts

USM Examples from past Thinking Matters conferences:

Title: Gender Differences During Bouts of Bench Press Weight Lifting

This study will be analyzing the difference in energy expenditure between men and women while weight lifting. Previous studies have shown that when weight lifting, women are more aerobic than men. We also will be analyzing whether or not there are differences in energy expenditure during the recovery from weight lifting exercise between women and men. For this study subjects will randomly complete sets of 7 reps, 14 reps and 21 reps at 50% of a 1 repetition maximum. Energy expenditure will be estimated by collecting post-exercise blood lactic acid measurements as well as oxygen consumption measurements before, during and prior to exercise.

Title: Lobster CyberCatch: An online game for elementary school students

Lobster CyberCatch is an online game intended to provide students in grades 4, 5, and 6 a learner-centered cognitive tool for math and science instruction within the real-life context of economic profits and loss in the commercial lobster fishery. By predicting the size of the catch from the trends in water temperature and balancing their expectations of the size of their catch with the expenses of fishing, students practice math skills and learn the importance of carefully collecting and interpreting data in order to make accurate predictions about future events. The current version of the game improves on the original prototype by allowing an individual account for each student, which keeps track of their boats, traps, money, and catch during each virtual day. Teachers can log it to monitor the progress of their students and offer aid if necessary. From the technical aspect, the game is implemented using several server side / client side technologies. PHP is used for performing server-side actions (i.e. writing to a MySQL database, calculations, etc.). AJAX is used as a client-server bridge, allowing immediate loading of documents and actions. The JQuery JavaScript API is used to deal with onscreen graphical manipulation, depending on the player's input.

Title: Agent Smith A Real-Time Game Playing Agent for Interactive Dynamic Games

The project will demonstrate an artificial intelligent agent capable of learning and behaving autonomously and making decisions quickly in a dynamic environment. The agent will be utilizing a fast-paced interactive game as its environment. This environment will allow for a spectator to watch the agent as it performs its tasks and even enter the game and challenge the agent. The agent's behavior is controlled by a rule-based system, which looks at high-level conditions, such as whether the agent is weak, and determines high-level actions, such as whether to head for the nearest known healing source. Using an evolutionary computation approach, in which the solution to a task is evolved over a number of generations, the agent's behavior will continue to adapt to its environment. Through the work in this project, we are exploring several research questions, including the development of successful vocabulary of high-level conditions and actions for the rule set, the challenges of rapid decision making, and the trade-offs between hand coding a rule set and using the evolutionary process to hone a rule set.

Other Examples:

Examples of Research Abstracts (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

Examples of Abstracts (UC - Berkeley)

Abstracts (UNC-Chapel Hill)

How to Write an Abstract (University of California - Berkeley)

Writing Up Research: the abstract (Asian Institute of Technology)