It should draw prospective readers in with attractive graphics. This is where graphical abstracts (also sometimes called visual abstracts) come in!Ī graphical abstract is kind of like a movie poster that gives away the plot. Plus, word limits mean abstracts are inevitably condensed and may require highly field-specific terminology, making it difficult to understand the most important aspects of a paper. Text abstracts go a long way toward providing a study summary for this purpose, but they can still require a researcher to take in a large amount of technical information when assessing the relevance of multiple papers at once. Researchers must comb through a growing body of scientific work to stay up to date on current research or when performing a literature review. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (2018), over 3 million scholarly papers are published each year, and that number is rapidly increasing.
