Editorial: Clarity - sister of citation: about the art of writing of the abstract

Abstract

The paper describes the principles of writing good abstracts to scientific papers in psychology, based on the recent version of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, version 6). The author calls for attention to abstracts, arguing that they play a key role in the citation destiny of a paper: it is mainly abstract that the readers use to make hypotheses about the content and quality of a paper when they decide to read or cite it. The author describes the general structure and content of abstracts, offers some advice on efficient choice of keywords, and formulates five main criteria of a good abstract: accuracy, succinctness, clarity, coherence, and impartiality. Based on APA guidelines, he describes the recommended content of abstracts for papers containing theoretical work, methodological contributions, empirical meta-analyses or reviews, original empirical studies, case studies. Two examples are used to illustrate the differences between abstracts of high and low quality. The paper can be useful for undergraduate, graduate students, and other beginning authors who aspire to master the art of writing abstracts, as well as experienced authors faced with the necessity of presenting their work in accordance with the publication standards of the APA.