An APA abstract is a brief, comprehensive summary of the contents of an article, research paper, dissertation, or report.
It follows the guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA), a format widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
An APA abstract summarizes, usually in one paragraph of between 150–250 words, the major aspects of a research paper or dissertation in a prescribed sequence that includes:
- The rationale: the overall purpose of the study, providing a clear context for the research undertaken.
- Information regarding the method and participants: including materials/instruments, design, procedure, and data analysis.
- Main findings or trends: effectively highlighting the key outcomes of the hypotheses.
- Interpretations and conclusion(s): solidify the implications of the research.
- Keywords related to the study: three to five terms that assist the paper’s discoverability in academic databases.
The abstract should stand alone, be “self-contained,” and make sense to the reader in isolation from the main article.
The purpose of the abstract is to give the reader a quick overview of the essential information before reading the entire article. The abstract is placed on its own page, directly after the title page and before the main body of the paper.
The abstract appears as the very first part of your paper. Even so, write it last: draft it only after finishing your full paper, once you know exactly what you are summarizing.
A reliable method is simple. Draft one sentence per section of the finished paper, then trim.
Note: This page reflects the latest version of the APA Publication Manual (i.e., APA 7), released in October 2019.
Structure of the Abstract
[NOTE: DO NOT separate the components of the abstract. Write it as a single paragraph. This section is separated to illustrate the abstract’s structure.]
An informative abstract mirrors the shape of the full paper, known as IMRAD (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion), in miniature. The four parts below follow that order.
1) The Rationale
One or two sentences describing the overall purpose of the study and the research problem(s) you investigated. You are basically justifying why this study was conducted.
- What is the importance of the research?
- Why would a reader be interested in the larger work?
- For example, are you filling a gap in previous research or applying new methods to take a fresh look at existing ideas or data?
Example Rationales
- Women who are diagnosed with breast cancer can experience an array of psychosocial difficulties; however, social support, particularly from a spouse, has been shown to have a protective function during this time. This study examined the ways in which a woman’s daily mood, pain, and fatigue, and her spouse’s marital satisfaction predict the woman’s report of partner support in the context of breast cancer.
- The current nursing shortage, high hospital nurse job dissatisfaction, and reports of uneven quality of hospital care are not uniquely American phenomena.
- Students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are more likely to exhibit behavioral difficulties than their typically developing peers. The aim of this study was to identify specific risk factors that influence variability in behavior difficulties among individuals with SEND.
2) The Method
Say who took part. Give the number of participants and their population. Then outline the method in one or two sentences, explaining what was done and how. Use the past tense: the work is already done.
Name the study’s design, such as an experiment, correlational study, randomised controlled trial, survey, or meta-analysis. State the materials or measures you used and summarise the essential procedure. For an experiment, name its independent and dependent variables.
Give enough detail that a reader can judge the study’s scope and rigour, but resist turning the abstract into a methods section in miniature.
Example Methods
- Pretest data from a larger intervention study and multilevel modeling were used to examine the effects of women’s daily mood, pain, and fatigue and average levels of mood, pain, and fatigue on women’s report of social support received from her partner, as well as how the effects of mood interacted with partners’ marital satisfaction.
- This paper presents reports from 43,000 nurses from more than 700 hospitals in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Germany in 1998–1999.
- The study sample comprised 4,228 students with SEND, aged 5–15, drawn from 305 primary and secondary schools across England. Explanatory variables were measured at the individual and school levels at baseline, along with a teacher-reported measure of behavior difficulties (assessed at baseline and the 18-month follow-up).
3) The Results
One or two sentences indicating the main findings or trends found as a result of your analysis. Use the past tense: results report what your analysis found.
Quantify the finding rather than writing a vague phrase such as “results are discussed.” State the direction and size of the main effect, with the key statistic behind it, so a reader can judge the finding for themselves.
Report your primary outcome honestly, even when it was not statistically significant. Overstating a null result is called spin. It means reporting that makes results look more favourable than the data warrant.
Among 72 randomised trials with a non-significant primary outcome, spin appeared in 37.5% of abstract results sections and 58.3% of conclusions (Boutron et al., 2010).
Example Results
- Results show that on days in which women reported higher levels of negative or positive mood, as well as on days they reported more pain and fatigue, they reported receiving more support. Women who, on average, reported higher levels of positive mood tended to report receiving more support than those who, on average, reported lower positive mood. However, average levels of negative mood were not associated with support. Higher average levels of fatigue but not pain were associated with higher support. Finally, women whose husbands reported higher levels of marital satisfaction reported receiving more partner support, but husbands’ marital satisfaction did not moderate the effect of women’s mood on support.
- Nurses in countries with distinctly different healthcare systems report similar shortcomings in their work environments and the quality of hospital care. While the competence of and relation between nurses and physicians appear satisfactory, core problems in work design and workforce management threaten the provision of care.
- Hierarchical linear modeling of data revealed that differences between schools accounted for between 13% (secondary) and 15.4% (primary) of the total variance in the development of students’ behavior difficulties, with the remainder attributable to individual differences. Statistically significant risk markers for these problems across both phases of education were being male, eligibility for free school meals, being identified as a bully, and lower academic achievement. Additional risk markers specific to each phase of education at the individual and school levels are also acknowledged.
4) The Conclusion / Implications
A brief summary of your conclusions and implications of the results, described in the present tense. Explain the results and why the study is important to the reader.
Keep the conclusion tied to what your results actually showed. A conclusion that reaches further than the data is the clearest sign of spin. That is the part of the abstract most likely to mislead a reader who stops there.
This matters beyond the paper itself. Spin is not confined to trials. A wide-ranging review found overstated conclusions across clinical trials, observational studies, and systematic reviews (Chiu et al., 2017).
- For example, what changes should be implemented as a result of the findings of the work?
- How does this work add to the body of knowledge on the topic?
Example Conclusions
Implications of these findings are discussed relative to assisting couples during this difficult time in their lives.
- Resolving these issues, which are amenable to managerial intervention, is essential to preserving patient safety and care of consistently high quality.
- Behavior difficulties are affected by risks across multiple ecological levels.
Addressing any one of these potential influences is therefore likely to contribute to the reduction in the problems displayed.
The above examples of abstracts are from the following papers:
Aiken, L. H., Clarke, S. P., Sloane, D. M., Sochalski, J. A., Busse, R., Clarke, H., … & Shamian, J. (2001). Nurses’ reports on hospital care in five countries . Health affairs, 20(3), 43-53.
Boeding, S. E., Pukay-Martin, N. D., Baucom, D. H., Porter, L. S., Kirby, J. S., Gremore, T. M., & Keefe, F. J. (2014). Couples and breast cancer: Women’s mood and partners’ marital satisfaction predicting support perception . Journal of Family Psychology, 28(5), 675–683.
Oldfield, J., Humphrey, N., & Hebron, J. (2017). Risk factors in the development of behavior difficulties among students with special educational needs and disabilities: A multilevel analysis . British journal of educational psychology, 87(2), 146-169.
5) Keywords
APA style asks for a short list of keywords placed at the end of the abstract. Databases use these words to help other researchers find your work. Choose terms that reflect your study’s main topics. Here are some tips for choosing keywords:
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Core Concepts: Identify the most important ideas or concepts in your paper. These often include your main research topic, the methods you’ve used, or the theories you’re discussing.
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Specificity: Your keywords should be specific to your research. For example, suppose your paper is about the effects of climate change on bird migration patterns in a specific region. In that case, your keywords might include “climate change,” “bird migration,” and the region’s name.
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Consistency with Paper: Make sure your keywords are consistent with the terms you’ve used in your paper. For example, if you use the term “adolescent” rather than “teen” in your paper, choose “adolescent” as your keyword, not “teen.”
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Jargon and Acronyms: Avoid overly specialized jargon or acronyms in your keywords, as other researchers may not understand or use them.
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Synonyms: Consider including synonyms of your keywords to capture as many relevant searches as possible. For example, if your paper discusses “post-traumatic stress disorder,” you might include “PTSD” as a keyword.
Remember, keywords exist so others can find your work. Think about the terms other researchers would search for. Then use those same terms naturally in the abstract itself, because databases index its wording too.
What an Abstract Should Not Contain
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Lengthy background or contextual information: The abstract should focus on your research and findings, not general topic background.
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Undefined jargon, abbreviations, or acronyms: The abstract should be accessible to a wide audience, so avoid highly specialized terms without defining them.
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Citations: Abstracts typically do not include citations, as they summarize original research.
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Incomplete sentences or bulleted lists: The abstract should be a single, coherent paragraph written in complete sentences.
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New information not covered in the paper: The abstract should only summarize the paper’s content.
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Subjective comments or value judgments: Stick to objective descriptions of your research.
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Excessive details on methods or procedures: Keep descriptions of methods brief and focused on main steps.
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Speculative or inconclusive statements: The abstract should state the research’s clear findings, not hypotheses or possible interpretations.
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Figures and tables: Illustrations, tables, and any references to them belong in the main body of your paper, not the abstract.
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Ellipses: Avoid ellipses (…), which suggest an unfinished thought or omitted text.
Types of Abstracts
Not every abstract works the same way. The kind you write depends on your paper’s purpose and its design.
Descriptive vs. Informative Abstracts
A descriptive abstract tells the reader what a paper covers, without giving the results. It works like a table of contents for reviews, theoretical papers, and other work that does not report a single result. It never states what the study actually found.
An informative abstract delivers the study’s substance, including its results and conclusion, so it can stand in for the paper. Nearly every empirical paper needs one. So does every APA-style abstract.
An abstract that only names a topic is inadequate for an empirical study. It withholds the finding a reader needs.
For example, “the effects of sleep on memory are examined” is merely descriptive, not truly informative.
The difference matters for how a reader searches, too: only an informative abstract lets a database index the actual finding.
Structured vs. Unstructured Abstracts
An unstructured abstract is one continuous paragraph in which aim, method, results, and conclusion run together without labels. It is the traditional form and is still standard in much of psychology and the humanities.
It reads as a connected argument. But an author can leave out an element, such as a clear statement of the primary result, without anyone noticing.
A structured abstract places the same content under labelled headings. These are typically Background or Objective, Method, Results, and Conclusions. Medical journals introduced the format in the 1980s to force completeness.
Making each element visible pushes authors to report what they might otherwise skip. Structured abstracts tend to be more complete and more informative (Hopewell et al., 2008; Beller et al., 2013).
There is a trade-off. A structured abstract can read like a terse checklist, and filling every heading does not guarantee an honest conclusion.
Your target journal usually decides which format you use. Either way, the abstract must contain the same four elements. The structured format simply makes their presence easy to check.
Conference Abstracts
A conference abstract is submitted months in advance, for review as a talk or poster. It is often published in the proceedings as the only public record of work that never reaches full publication.
Few readers ever see the full study.
Because it is judged competitively and read on its own, it must be unusually self-sufficient while staying accurate.
The pressure to make preliminary or incomplete work sound compelling makes this genre especially vulnerable to over-claiming. That is one reason reporting guidelines cover conference abstracts as well as full journal abstracts (Hopewell et al., 2008; Beller et al., 2013).
Make every word count. Assume a conference reviewer will read nothing else of your work.
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Abstracts
An abstract for a systematic review or meta-analysis has to summarise a synthesis of many studies, not just one.
It should name the eligibility criteria and databases searched. It should also report the number of studies and participants pooled. It should give the combined effect estimate with its confidence interval, and how much the underlying studies varied.
A dedicated reporting standard, PRISMA for Abstracts, lists exactly what such an abstract should contain (Beller et al., 2013).
Compliance is not automatic. One well-known danger is a review abstract that reports a pooled result without flagging what undermines it. Publication bias is the tendency for studies with positive results to be published and cited more often.
Heterogeneity is how much the pooled studies differ from one another. Readers should look for both.
Clinicians and guideline-writers often rely on this abstract alone, which is exactly why the checklist exists.
Randomised Controlled Trial Abstracts
The abstract of a randomised controlled trial carries the highest stakes, because trial results feed directly into clinical and policy decisions.
CONSORT for Abstracts sets its own standard. It requires the trial design, participants, setting, and interventions to be reported. It must also state the pre-specified primary outcome, the numbers randomised and analysed, the effect estimate, and any harms (Hopewell et al., 2008).
Report the primary outcome honestly, even if not significant. That guards against the most common failure: quietly shifting the abstract’s emphasis onto a secondary outcome that happened to be significant.
Whichever type you write, the core discipline stays the same. Report only what you can support, and let the format fit the study.
APA Style for Abstracts
An APA abstract must be formatted as follows:
Include the running head aligned to the left at the top of the page (professional papers only) and page number. Note, student papers do not require a running head.
On the first line, center the heading “Abstract” and make it bold (do not underline or italicize).
Do not indent the single abstract paragraph (which begins one line below the section title).
Double-space the text.
Use the same 12-point serif or approved sans-serif font as the rest of your paper, such as Times New Roman.
Set one-inch (or 2.54 cm) margins.
If you include a “keywords” section at the end of the abstract, indent the first line and italicize the word “Keywords” while leaving the keywords themselves without any formatting.
Example APA Abstract Page
Why the Abstract Matters
What the Abstract Does
The abstract does four jobs at once. Many readers never see anything else of the paper. For most papers, it is the only part that is freely searchable in every database.
- Screening: Readers use it to decide quickly whether a paper is worth reading in full.
- Discoverability: Databases index the abstract, title, and keywords, so your key terms must appear in it.
- Stand-alone record: Conference proceedings, database entries, and systematic-review screening often work from the abstract alone.
- Decision-making: Clinicians, journalists, and policymakers often read only the abstract, so its framing spreads.
Here is a useful test of a finished abstract. Would a reader who saw only the abstract come away with an accurate impression of the study’s question, scope, findings, and their real strength?
If not, the abstract has failed, however polished it reads.
Spin in Trial Abstracts
Boutron et al. (2010) examined randomised trials whose primary outcome was not statistically significant. From 616 trial reports they identified 72 eligible trials. Two independent raters coded each one for spin, separately in the title, the abstract, and the main text.
Spin was common, and it clustered in the abstract. It appeared in the results section of 37.5% of abstracts and in the conclusions of 58.3%.
In almost a quarter of trials (23.6%), the abstract conclusion focused only on the treatment’s effectiveness. The title was spun in 18% of reports.
Most of these trials had failed to show a benefit on their own primary measure. Most of their abstracts still concluded as though one had been shown. The study defined and quantified abstract spin, and it has driven reporting reform since.
How Spin Spreads
Distortion in an abstract does not stay in the journal. Yavchitz et al. (2012) assembled 70 two-arm randomised trials from press releases indexed in a science-news database.
They traced each one back to its journal article and forward to news coverage. Spin appeared in 40% of abstract conclusions and 47% of press releases.
The link was strong. The best predictor of spin in a press release was spin in the abstract’s conclusion (a relative risk of about 5.6).
Where the abstract was spun, press releases and news items tended to carry the same spin. Findings were overestimated in roughly a quarter of them.
Accuracy is a public issue, not merely an academic one. The abstract is the seed from which misleading news grows.
How Widespread Is Spin?
Chiu, Grundy, and Bero (2017) gathered the scattered evidence in a methodological systematic review of spin across the biomedical literature. Thirty-five reports met their criteria.
They covered clinical trials, observational studies, diagnostic-accuracy studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses. Spin was most common, and most variable, in trials.
Two tactics recurred across designs. One was drawing attention away from non-significant results. The other was using causal language for findings that were not causal.
The link between spin and industry funding was inconclusive, probably because the pooled studies were too different to give a stable estimate. The authors argued that editors and peer reviewers should be trained to recognise spin.
Checklists help, but only so far. CONSORT for Abstracts and PRISMA for Abstracts make abstracts more complete (Hopewell et al., 2008; Beller et al., 2013). An author can still fill every heading and spin the conclusion.
Further Information
How long should an APA abstract be?
An APA abstract should typically be between 150 to 250 words long. However, the exact length may vary depending on specific publication or assignment guidelines. It is crucial that it succinctly summarizes the essential elements of the work, including purpose, methods, findings, and conclusions.
Write it as a single paragraph. Many journals cap abstracts at 250 words, so check your target journal’s limit.
The limit is a useful discipline. It forces every sentence to justify its place. Redundancy, hedging, and throat-clearing are the first things to cut.
If you run over, cut background to one sentence. A full literature review belongs in the paper, not the abstract. Never trim the results to save words, because readers want them most of all.
Where does the abstract go in an APA paper?
In an APA paper, the abstract sits on its own page, directly after the title page and before the main body. This is typically page 2. The page opens with the centered, bold word “Abstract”, followed by the abstract text.
Keywords are optional. If you add them, start a new line below the abstract with an indented, italic label Keywords: followed by three to five terms.
The abstract paragraph is not indented, unlike the body of the paper. It is double-spaced, in the same font as the rest of the manuscript, with one-inch margins.
The abstract appears first, but write it last. It should stand alone: a reader who never sees the paper should still understand it. No citations, figures, or tables belong here.
What are the 4 C’s of abstract writing?
The 4 C’s of abstract writing are an approach to help you create a well-structured and informative abstract. They are:
Conciseness: An abstract should briefly summarize the key points of your study. Stick to the word limit (typically between 150-250 words for an APA abstract) and avoid unnecessary details.
Clarity: Your abstract should be easy to understand. Avoid jargon and complex sentences. Clearly explain the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions of your study.
Completeness: Even though it’s brief, an abstract must be complete. It should cover the purpose, methods, key findings, and your interpretation of the results.
Cohesion: The abstract should flow logically from one point to the next, maintaining a coherent narrative about your study. It’s not just a list of disjointed elements; it’s a brief story of your research from start to finish.
What is the abstract of a psychology paper?
A psychology abstract is a snapshot of the paper. It lets readers grasp the purpose, methodology, results, and implications without reading the full text. It is typically 150-250 words.
A good abstract is informative: it states the study’s findings and conclusions, so it can stand in for the paper. Many readers read nothing else of the paper, so it must be accurate.
It answers four questions in order. Why was the study done? What was done? What was found? What does it mean? That mirrors the paper’s IMRAD structure in miniature.
Databases such as PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar index and display the abstract. For most papers, it is the only part that is freely searchable. That is why your key terms must appear in it.
Key Takeaways
- Structure: An APA abstract packs the rationale, method, results, and conclusion into one paragraph of 150–250 words.
- Placement: It sits alone on its own page, right after the title page and before the main body.
- Format: The heading “Abstract” is centred and bold, the paragraph itself is not indented, and the text is double-spaced.
- Keywords: List three to five terms below the abstract using the same wording as your paper, so databases can find your work.
- No Citations: An abstract summarises your own study; it never cites outside sources or introduces new information.
- Report Honestly: State your actual findings, even null ones. A conclusion that outruns the data is the clearest sign of “spin.”
References
Beller, E. M., Glasziou, P. P., Altman, D. G., Hopewell, S., Bastian, H., Chalmers, I., Gøtzsche, P. C., Lasserson, T., & Tovey, D. (2013). PRISMA for Abstracts: Reporting systematic reviews in journal and conference abstracts. PLoS Medicine, 10(4), Article e1001419. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001419
Boutron, I., Dutton, S., Ravaud, P., & Altman, D. G. (2010). Reporting and interpretation of randomized controlled trials with statistically nonsignificant results for primary outcomes. JAMA, 303(20), 2058–2064. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.651
Chiu, K., Grundy, Q., & Bero, L. (2017). “Spin” in published biomedical literature: A methodological systematic review. PLoS Biology, 15(9), Article e2002173. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2002173
Hopewell, S., Clarke, M., Moher, D., Wager, E., Middleton, P., Altman, D. G., & Schulz, K. F. (2008). CONSORT for reporting randomised trials in journal and conference abstracts. The Lancet, 371(9609), 281–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61835-2
Yavchitz, A., Boutron, I., Bafeta, A., Marroun, I., Charles, P., Mantz, J., & Ravaud, P. (2012). Misrepresentation of randomized controlled trials in press releases and news coverage: A cohort study. PLoS Medicine, 9(9), Article e1001308. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001308
