CSCI 373: Titles and
Abstracts That Work
Michael A. Heroux
Writers want their work to be read. A good
title and abstract is often the first and only opportunity to catch the attention
of a potential reader. Therefore, careful attention to the form and content of
these two elements is critical to your success as a published author. This set
of exercises leads you through several measured efforts to improve an
existing title and abstract and then asks you to write these elements for your
own project.
1. Checklist
for Writing Abstracts: How to Write an
Abstract by Phil Koopman, Carnegie
Mellon University.
2. Self-illustrating
Abstract: How
to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps by Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto.
3. The do nots
of Writing an Abstract: How to Have
Your Abstract Rejected by
Mary-Claire van Leunen and Richard Lipton.
4. Sample
Abstract From What's new on the web?: the evolution of the
web from a search engine perspective:
ABSTRACT
We seek to gain improved insight into how Web search
engines should cope with the evolving Web, in an attempt to provide users with
the most up-to-date results possible. For this purpose
we collected weekly snapshots of some 150 Web sites over the course of one
year, and measured the evolution of content and link structure. Our
measurements focus on aspects of potential interest to search engine designers:
the evolution of link structure over time, the rate of creation of new pages
and new distinct content on the Web, and the rate of change of the content of
existing pages under search-centric measures of degree of change. Our findings
indicate a rapid turnover rate of Web pages, i.e., high rates of birth and
death, coupled with an even higher rate of turnover in the hyperlinks that
connect them. For pages that persist over time we found that, perhaps
surprisingly, the degree of content shift as measured using TF.IDF cosine
distance does not appear to be consistently correlated with the frequency of
content updating. Despite this apparent non-correlation, the rate of content
shift of a given page is likely to remain consistent over time. That is, pages
that change a great deal in one week will likely change by a similarly large
degree in the following week. Conversely, pages that experience little change will
continue to experience little change. We conclude the paper with a discussion
of the potential implications ofour results for the
design of effective Web search engines.
Exercises:
1. The title of this article is catchy but long. Develop
one or two titles that retain your interest but are shorter.
2.
The above abstract
has 249 words (can you guess the imposed limit?). Using the Koopman
and van Leunen/Lipton articles as guides, do the
following:
a.
Identify the
missing elements (according to Koopman).
b.
Add these elements.
c.
Find the word count
and reduce it by 50 words, without losing significant meaning.
d.
Reduce it by 50
more words, or even more if possible.
3.
You have developed
a new sorting algorithm for a general list of integers. Your algorithm is O(n). Wow, you are good! The previous
best algorithm is a bubble sort, O(?).
Write a 100-word abstract for a technical article you will submit for
publication.
4.
Write a
200-word-or-fewer abstract for your project. Keep for your final
State-of-the-field paper.