The Significance of the Abstract in Academic Research

Abstract

An abstract is a concise summary of the entire article, providing a brief overview of the background, purpose, methodology, results, and conclusions. It serves as a snapshot of the study, enabling readers, editors, and journals' chief editors to quickly assess its relevance and decide whether to read the full article. The fact that most of the universities' professors suffer from this is that most of the scientific journals indexed in Scopus refuse their works to be published. This is due to missing data which are criteria of the APA style (7th edition). This study aims to investigate the university professors' awareness of the abstract content, the most abstracts missing elements in Iraqi works, and the correlation between master thesis abstracts' content and university professors' awareness of the abstract content. To achieve the aims of the study, the following questions were set:

1-          To what extent do the university professors aware of the abstract elements?

2-          What are the most missing data in the abstract of the master's thesis?

3-             Is there a correlation between master thesis abstracts' content and university professors' awareness of the abstract content? The outcomes of the study are significant for the Iraqi university instructors, postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers to write a comprehensive, well-organized, and cohesive abstract that acts as a mirror of the scientific work. The study is qualitative and quantitative in nature, to collect the qualitative data a sample consisting of 6 university professors who volunteered to participate in the study was interviewed by conducting a semi-structured interview. In addition, to collect the quantitative data a sample consisting of 15 master theses were chosen randomly from 5 universities. Frequencies, percentages, and Pearson's correlation matrix were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the university professors' replies agreed on the most common items that an abstract should contain, which were the introduction, the aims, the purpose, the instrument, and the results. The university professors did not mention that an abstract should contain a problem of a study, the methodology, and the conclusion. All the participants are unaware of the criteria that an abstract should include. In addition, most of the master theses' abstracts miss the methodology, the problem/ gap, and the conclusion. Finally, the results revealed that there is a positive correlation between the master thesis abstracts' content and university professors' awareness of the abstract content. The university professors' awareness is due to the overlap between the functions of the abstract content. Also, the master theses' missing data are due to the student's imitation of previous theses and the supervisor's awareness of the criteria of the APA style 7th edition. In light of the results, some recommendations were suggested.