Formatting APS Journal Articles :: Title Page
The abstract provides an outline of the hypothesis and experimental outcomes of the article. No specific results need to be quoted, although many times authors do give explicit data. In effect, the abstract is a synopsis of the whole paper, introducing the basic premise behind the study, some brief background on how the experiments were conducted, any relevant results, and the authors' final conclusions.
If the author has labeled the text with the word "Abstract," delete the label.
The abstract should be a single paragraph of approximately 250 words. At proof stage, APS prefers to avoid having the abstract run over into two columns on the title page. If you believe that this may occur, feel free to query the author and request a shorter abstract; however, this is not a hard and fast rule.
The abstract always begins with bibliographic data: the authors' names (in bold); the article title (in roman); the journal name (in italic); and the volume number, page range, year, date of first publication in Articles in PresS, and the «zdoi» code (all in roman). These bibliographic data (metadata) are run into the text of the abstract, separated by an em-dash. Author names are styled as they would be in the references: their last name first followed by their initials. It is not always clear whether a middle name is part of the last name or should be included as initials (for example, Ralph Taylor Smith, Lin Bo Lang, or Janet Davis Howards). If you are unsure as to whether this information is correct, query the authors.
Abbreviations in the text of the abstract are permitted. Spell out the term at its first mention and follow its abbreviation in parentheses. For long but understandable terms, such as some drug names, undefined abbreviations may be used even if the term appears only once in the abstract, to cut down on the word count. Sometimes, terms are abbreviated in the abstract that are not abbreviated in the text.
There are no headers or section breaks in the abstract. For example, many authors like to write things such as "Methods: we isolated chicken cells from red chickens. (paragraph break) Results: we found that these cells were not happy about this." To edit this, you should delete the terms "Methods" and "Results," make the rest of the statements into complete sentences, and then delete the paragraph break, so that it reads "We isolated chicken cells from red chickens. We found that these cells were not happy about this."
References cited in the abstract must also be found in the Reference List, where the complete information for the reference is provided. However, in the abstract, these references are not cited by their reference number alone. Instead, the following form of citation is used: the entire author list with initials (in roman); the journal name (in italics); and the volume, page numbers, and year (in roman). The article title is omitted for the sake of brevity. Query the author if the information is not complete.
Figures or tables may not be mentioned in the abstract. Do not include figure or table callouts.
Make sure that your cursor is within the abstract. Use the «abs» function in ABRA. The abstract should format itself.