I’m in the same boat that I don’t think the abstract itself of any I’ve read has been memorable in the slightest, but they usually serve to give me a tiny glimpse of whether or not I might find the underlying content interesting.
For example, I quite enjoyed the paper “Web Browser Fingerprinting Using Only Cascading Style Sheets,” but its abstract isn’t anything overly exciting. The title itself conveyed enough information for me to gather my interest, its attract just confirmed it was probably worth reading it.
I'm well into the thousands of research papers read. Understood a fair fraction of them. Couldn't tell you what the abstract was for any. The memorable parts are the ideas and the results within the paper.
Some titles stick. "Attention is all you need". "SSA is functional programming". Plus more people see the title than read the abstract. Only one I got to name myself was "Shared Memory Remote Procedure Calls" which I now realise is in exactly the same theme of given the title, you don't need the abstract or the contents.
Hard to separate the memorability of the abstract from the underlying material.
IMO the most memorable papers contain some unexpected simplification: a complicated problem turns out to reduce to something much simpler [0], perhaps for a counterintuitive reason [1].
So a memorable abstract should advertise that the paper contains some cute little trick. This may not help you actually publish though
The ones with a memorable idea from the paper. People like to read about ideas that are interesting. If you can summarize an interesting idea and put it in the abstract, it will make it better.
I’m in the same boat that I don’t think the abstract itself of any I’ve read has been memorable in the slightest, but they usually serve to give me a tiny glimpse of whether or not I might find the underlying content interesting.
For example, I quite enjoyed the paper “Web Browser Fingerprinting Using Only Cascading Style Sheets,” but its abstract isn’t anything overly exciting. The title itself conveyed enough information for me to gather my interest, its attract just confirmed it was probably worth reading it.
I'm well into the thousands of research papers read. Understood a fair fraction of them. Couldn't tell you what the abstract was for any. The memorable parts are the ideas and the results within the paper.
Some titles stick. "Attention is all you need". "SSA is functional programming". Plus more people see the title than read the abstract. Only one I got to name myself was "Shared Memory Remote Procedure Calls" which I now realise is in exactly the same theme of given the title, you don't need the abstract or the contents.
Gotta have a look at yours! And I remember the name "Attention is all you need" too!
Hard to separate the memorability of the abstract from the underlying material.
IMO the most memorable papers contain some unexpected simplification: a complicated problem turns out to reduce to something much simpler [0], perhaps for a counterintuitive reason [1].
So a memorable abstract should advertise that the paper contains some cute little trick. This may not help you actually publish though
[0]: Attack the RLHF problem with a simple classification loss: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290
[1]: Frustratingly Easy Meta-Embeddings: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05262
The ones with a memorable idea from the paper. People like to read about ideas that are interesting. If you can summarize an interesting idea and put it in the abstract, it will make it better.
see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-968X.12...
include a SUMMARIUM in Latin and ΣΥΝΟΨΙΣ in Greek, for that real Scholar effect.
Haha, that oughta do the trick :D
Most memorable to me: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1966-72-06/S0002-9904-1966...
Short, succinct and no AI in sight.
Oooh, thanks!
https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf
"Abstract The Paxos algorithm, when presented in plain English, is very simple."
Appreciate it, thanks!