Introductory Course in Abstracting

Course Overview

The goal of the introductory course in Abstracting is for students to produce good quality informative abstracts (for Research Articles,  Short Communications, Conferences and Dissertations) in English in a field of science, preferably their own field.[1]

[1] The course is given online, in English. If there is sufficient demand, the course can be conducted in Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

The following competencies are to be developed:

• knowledge of methods, techniques and strategies to identify and extract relevant information from the main text;
• awareness of the various types and functions of abstracts;
• writing skills in English and the ability to translate or review translations of abstracts into English, as the case may be (note: the instructor is a skilled translator from Spanish, Portuguese and German into English);
  • evaluation skills as applied to abstracts.[1]

    [1] Assessment of abstracts through comparison with the complete text, whether monolingual (English only) or bilingual (involving Spanish, Portuguese or German) is the focus of the advanced course, Review and Editing of Scientific Abstracts.