Writing a scientific manuscript: Title, Abstract, Keywords & References

Prof Sanjiv Mahadeva
Department of Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
University of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
This abstract will cover a brief overview of writing a title, abstract, keywords & references for a scientific manuscript. In the hierarchy of a structured manuscript, the title probably holds the greatest importance as to whether the manuscript will attract attention from readers, reviewers, editors and databases. The title can include the following – i) key information about the study design, ii) important keywords and iii) what has been discovered in the study. The abstract is the 2nd most read part of a manuscript, which can help influence the initial decisions by reviewers, editors and researchers. The recommendation should be to compose a structured abstract with the following sections: introduction, objective, methods, results and conclusion. Some examples of “good” and “not so good” abstracts are highlighted in the lecture. Keywords are mainly important for indexing databases which help to identify your manuscript during searches, and the general advice is to follow the medical subject headings (MESH) from Medline. Lastly, for referencing, it is nowadays recommended to use reference managing softwares such as EndNote which facilitate entering and organizing references tremendously.