I have reviewed many papers during the time period between March 2020 and the present. (And been very frustrated by slow, poor, and no reviews of my own submissions!) Most of the journals I do work for adhere to the APA/ American Psychological Association style of formatting and paper organization. And this is not meant to be a post in praise of or expressing criticism of that particular style. Because it is widely-used in social and human sciences, it is the style I have most familiarity with - going back to the 5th edition. I will say I like some of the changes associated with the 7th edition, especially getting rid of the very confusing rule about how many authors to show in an in text citation. I have seen probably a dozen papers now where authors provide a summary of the entire paper as the opening of the paper. This is separate from, and follows the abstract, and basically looks to me like a summary of each section - a few sentences that summarize the intro/review of lit, a few sentences that summarize the methods, a summary of the findings (hence the title of this post) and a summary of the implications. The style in which this is presented often looks to me more like a philosophical or other humanities paper - "In this work, we illustrate....." So I went back to my APA guide to see if this is something new - is there some direction to add an extended summary over and above the abstract? But as far as I can tell, the recommendations for content by section are unchanged in APA 7 versus 6 (or 5). I have seen some overlong abstracts in theses and dissertations, so my guess is that this is a leftover from the manuscript's previous identity as a thesis or dissertation, since, after all, most published research comes from theses or dissertations (I cannot quickly locate the source for this information but I believe it is accurate and I believe the proportion of published works that began life as a student culminating project is in the 70% - 90% range.)
Whenever I see this, I recommend as a peer review (that's me - reviewer #2!) that the authors not do the big reveal on page 1 (the abstract is bad enough but hopefully it serves just to whet readers' appetites) and instead put the content in the section where it belongs. Because I keep seeing this, and it has occurred in papers from various contexts, I'm beginning to think that someone out there in the world of the internet (increasingly an inter-mess - a spreading sea of content of unknown providence and questionable value) - on a blog, or YouTube, or, if recently, on TikTok - has give this advice to authors. Because after all, people don't have time to read your whole paper, so just tell them the end on the first page. But what I think authors may be overlooking, is that papers are often long enough (or too long) and this just adds even more length. A better solution is to write in a concise, compelling way, so readers want to spend time engaging with your work! And keep the ending, at least some of it, a secret - so finding out how the story is resolved is one of the rewards of reading the paper.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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