The Anatomy of a Paper

Title and abstract are the two most searched and used parts of an article by scholars from within the field and others alike. Thus, it is important to use terms that can be understood by a broader audience, while addressing the fundamental elements that the reviewers typically want to know about a paper. The importance of a carefully crafted abstract cannot be overemphasized because the online search engines of bibliographic databases typically list the title, authors, and abstract of a paper. Some search systems still use key words but most scan the title and abstract for these words or phrases. The abstract frames the 3Ps of an article—Purpose, Procedure, and Principal findings (Craig, 2010; Koopman, 1997; Michaelson, 1990). For the author, preparing the abstract is a beneficial exercise as it helps strip away the peripheral information to expose the central purpose, process used, and the most significant contributions. For the editors and reviewers, it helps set the tone for the manuscript. Once the article is published, a carefully crafted abstract may encourage or discourage potential readers toward the full paper. Michaelson (1990) observed that “when properly written, the abstract becomes a definitive piece of writing for both author and reader, but when it is poorly written, both are at a disadvantage” (p. 31). Crafting an effective abstract is not simple. In a few sentences, using succinct phrases that weave in key words, the author must convey the crux of the manuscript and entice the reader to the rest of the paper. The word limit of the abstract is specified by the journal, and for FBR the limit is 100 words. The abstract of an empirical article will read quite different from that of a theory building or a review article. In addition to using the abstract of a previously published paper as a template for your abstract, valuable guidance can be found in sources such as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2009), Huff (1999), and Michaelson (1990). In selecting an exemplar abstract of a recently published article in FBR, we shortlisted five that we found to be effective using our measure of clarity of purpose, procedure, and principal findings and ran this shortlist by FBR’s editorial team. While each abstract had some notable elements and none was found perfect on all dimensions, the following abstract by Lungeanu and Ward (2012) was the most well received by our team because of its “clarity in describing with few targeted words the addressed phenomenon, conceptual lenses adopted, methodology used, and key result”. Further appreciated was the fact that it “gets to the point right away,” “follows the logical structure of the paper,” is “more precise with regard to the findings,” and “explains the contents of the article in a fairly straightforward way.” However, it was noted that the wording could be streamlined further and the last sentence could be more informative. This article brings together research on philanthropy, family business, and governance to examine patterns of giving by U.S. family versus nonfamily independent foundations. The authors use a sample comprising the 200 largest U.S. independent foundations in 2007 to show that family foundations are more focused in their grant making than nonfamily foundations. Board size moderates this relationship. They also offer a new typology of family foundations to show that the generation stage of the family and the foundation board’s composition are associated with different levels of grant making diversity in family foundations but in dissimilar ways. Scholarly and practical implications are discussed. Through a long review process, authors, reviewers, and editors can overlook a manuscript’s title and abstract,when everyone’s attention is focused on the details of the paper’s revisions, and they can come to be mismatched with the paper’s content.Once a paper is at the Minor Revision or Acceptance stage, the author should check to see whether they need to be changed. They will be read and scrutinized more frequently than the paper itself, and so it is important that they reflect the paper accurately and favorably.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.