说来惭愧，研究生都已经读到第四年了，才刚刚发了一篇会议论文而已，这篇会议的摘要也是在老板的帮助下写的，自己本来写的一个初稿，但被老板全盘否定了。搞得现在连写摘要的信心都没有了。最近准备投2015年的AIAA会议，看了一些要求，需要有一个长摘要extended abstract，但却又不知道从何下手，遂到网上找了一篇有关写长摘要的文章，是美国马里兰大学的一个教授写的，读完之后觉得收益匪浅。

其中有几点个人觉得非常重要，就给翻译下来了，以便以后随时翻看，但强烈推荐阅读原文。

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什么是长摘要呢？它不仅仅是指篇幅较一般的摘要长，更重要的是它要包括参考文献，相关工作的比较，核心理论的论证以及其他一些必要的细节，而这些一般只会在正文而不是在摘要中出现。一个长摘要应该能够使读者在一个小时以内理解文章的核心思想及其价值，从这个角度讲他的写作难度要高于一般的学术文章。而一些次要的东西不应该写入长摘要中，这些内容包括：将来的工作，一些审稿人应该知道的论证细节或者背景补充知识以及跟核心思想不相关的东西。

摘要中展示的工作是否在之前的工作的基础上有了更进一步的发展？在摘要中应该清晰的描述使用的新技术所带来的优势。仅仅描述一个问题的新的解决方法，但是这个问题可以用之前的技术简单有效的解决，这样的摘要是不会被接收的。一篇好的摘要能够清楚地描述他们的工作结果能够解决之前不能解决的问题，并且说明这个结果的重要性。

这篇摘要是否对一个问题提出了新的见解或者描述了可能对别人有用的经验？一些评委惋惜道：虽然有些作者搭建了大量的系统，试验了很多方式来研究那个系统工作哪个不工作，但是这些作者只在摘要中写出了跟他们的系统有关的很少的技术型结果。对应用了新技术的试验结果或者解决问题的经验的相关推广说明能够显著提高任何一篇文章的价值。

如果你所准备的长摘要不能使评委在一个小时内理解消化并意识到它的重要性，那么就很有可能被拒了，不管这个研究做的有多好。有很多类型的研究可能并不能满足这个要求，不管它写的有多好，这个时候还是建议去投期刊，这样就有更多的时间来正确的判别它的价值。

本文重点说明了一篇长摘要应该是行文流畅并且易于理解，当然这个标准也适用于全文的撰写。

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Advice to Authors of Extended Abstracts(关于会议论文Extended Abstracts的写法建议)
William Pugh-----Dept. of Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

This article stems from discussions among the program committee for SIGPLAN'91 PLDI. The program committee thought it might be useful to put together some advice for authors. To give some context to these suggestions, I've also provided a brief description of the process by which the conference papers were reviewed, partially from my perspective. This process is similar to the way most SIGPLAN conferences are run, although the details differ for each conference.

How the Papers Were Reviewed:

There were 169 extended abstracts submitted to the SIGPLAN '91 PLDI conference. At the request of the program committee chair, program committee members  refrained from submitting any abstracts to the conference. This allowed us to avoid having to deal with direct conflict of interests.

Each program committee member was assigned 60 abstracts, based on his or her areas of expertise. Since all abstracts were sent to all committee members, members could review any abstracts they wished, so long as they reviewed at least the abstracts assigned to them. Program committee members could review the abstracts themselves or have others review them, although in most cases the program committee members at least briefly reviewed all the abstracts they were assigned, even if they had colleagues review some of them in detail for them.

I wasn't able to read any abstracts until after the semester ended in mid-December, and I allowed myself a week off from reading abstracts for Christmas. Thus, I had about four weeks to read the abstracts, and I couldn't spend much more than 20 hours a week reading them . Since I read more abstracts than I was assigned, this came down to an average of one hour per abstract.

In reading an abstract, I had to try to understand the work presented, the significance of it, and possible problems with it. I spent at least 30-40 minutes on almost every abstract, sometimes coming back to an abstract several times. I spent over four hours each on several abstracts. In one case this was because the abstract looked interesting but was badly written; in another case, because the abstract dealt with a dense subject. In several cases, I spent several hours on a paper simply because I had expertise or interest in the topic described by the paper.

The program committee met for two days to discuss the submitted abstracts and choose those to be accepted. A preliminary numerical ranking provided by the reviews received in advance of the meeting helped structure our discussions. On each of several passes through all the submissions, some papers were eliminated from consideration, others were retained for further discussion and some were accepted. Finally, we had a total of 28 accepted papers.

What is an Extended Abstract?

An extended abstract is not simply a long abstract. An extended abstract should contain references, comparisons to related work, proofs of key theorems and other details expected in a research paper but not in an abstract.

An extended abstract is a research paper whose ideas and significance can be understood in less than an hour. Writing an extended abstract can be more demanding than writing a research paper.

Some things that can be omitted from an extended abstract: future work, details of proofs or implementation that should seem plausible to reviewers, ramifications not relevant to the key ideas of the abstract.

Some Issues Considered by the Committee:

Are there any major technical flaws in the abstract? In a few rare cases, reviewers found serious technical flaws in a submission.

Is the work a significant advance over previous work in the area, by the same authors or others? The abstract should give a clear description of the advantages offered by the new technique over previous techniques. Simply describing an interesting new way of doing something that could be done as simply and efficiently by previous techniques won't get an abstract accepted. The best abstracts gave a clear description of what their results allowed that couldn't be done previously and why that is significant. Examples and measurements are great for this. 

A related problem is not citing relevant work in the area. Don't rely on the program committee realizing that X's work in this area doesn't apply because you are considering a slightly different problem that renders X's methods unusable.

If you have additional current papers on topics related to your submission , be sure to discuss the contribution of your submission over that of your other papers.

If the work involves a specialized application, does it make a more general contribution? Some abstracts described interesting specialized applications. Much of the content of these abstracts involved descriptions of the context of the work or applying standard techniques in the new context. In some cases, it was unclear if the resulting paper would be useful to people not interested in the author's specific application.

If you submit an extended abstract involving a specialized application, be sure the significant contributions of your work don't get lost in the details of your application.

Does the abstract offer an interesting perspective on a problem or describe experience that might be useful to others? Several committee members lamented that although several authors had built substantial systems, and tried several approaches to learn which ones worked and which ones didn't, the authors only wrote abstracts about narrow technical results related to their systems. Relevant comments about practical experiences attempting to apply new technologies can significantly increase the value of any paper. 

Is the abstract well presented and understandable? We didn't reject any abstracts for being poorly presented. However, all other things being equal, the program committee was more enthusiastic about abstracts that were clear and well presented.

Is the abstract too long? There are many methods of trying to fit 20 pages of material into the 10 page limit on extended abstracts  They are all strongly discouraged. The page limit is to encourage authors to write abstracts that can be absorbed quickly, not to save trees, . No abstracts were rejected purely for reasons of length, but none of the accepted abstracts significantly violated the spirit of the 10 page limit; consider this a strong hint.

Several program committee members stated that after reading 10 pages worth of material, they felt free to stop reading at any point if they were not truly excited by the paper.

Don't let the page count limit prevent you from providing figures or examples that make the paper easier to understand. The page count limit should be considered an upper bound on the number of full pages of text, exclusive of figures and examples. One program committee member disagreed and thought that the page limit should be strictly adhered to, noting that if a picture is worth 1000 words, a picture is worth more than the 200 words it displaces.

In exceptional cases, it may be appropriate to put additional material in an appendix that extends past the length limit. This is acceptable only if the extended abstract itself stands on its own without the additional material. Given their time limitations, most reviewers probably will ignore the appendix. Acceptable material for an appendix could include background material for committee members not familiar with the details of the research area and details of proofs and implementations omitted from the body of the abstract.

Does the abstract address the obvious questions raised by the research? For example, if an abstract claims to describe ``an efficient, practical algorithm'' for something, it should give empirical timings, asymptotic analysis or both. If the techniques described require solving a problem that is NP-Complete or undecidable in general, the abstract should discuss the difficultly of solving the problem. It may be that in practice the problems that arise in the author's application can be solved efficiently; but if the abstract doesn't discuss it, the program committee doesn't know if the author is even aware of the potential problem.

The program committee was sympathetic about not expecting data that ought to have been very difficult to collect. However, the committee was disappointed in several instances by abstracts that failed to report data that ought to have been easy to collect and would have answered obvious questions about the work.

Final Comments for Authors:

An ideal submission should have a reviewer intrigued within the first 5 minutes of reading, excited within 15 minutes and satisfied within 45 minutes. If your abstract fails any of these tests, it might be rejected no matter how good the research is. Committee members may spend more than 30-45 minutes on your abstract, but you shouldn't rely on it.

Before you submit an abstract, give it to a programming languages colleague who is not familiar with the details of your research or your research area and ask him or her how much they can get out of it in less than an hour.

Don't overlook the importance of the introduction, figures, examples, and conclusions  in an extended abstract.

Remember that some program committee members, of necessity, are not experts in your area of research and that when they pick up your abstract they may have already reviewed 8 abstracts that day. Material that may take an expert in your area 5 minutes to go through might take some committee members 20 minutes or more. 

There are some types of research that are difficult to publish in a conference simply due to the amount of time and effort that would be required for the program committee members to review the abstract properly. If you can't prepare an extended abstract of your work that can be digested and its significance understood in an hour, it may not be possible to accept your paper, no matter how good the described research. For some types of research , it may be impossible to meet this standard, no matter how well you write. This is an unfortunate flaw in the system, and we have no remedy except to suggest that you submit your paper to a journal where more time can be taken to referee it properly. 

Please remember that we cannot give as much attention to a submission as would be given to a journal submission, and we do make mistakes. If you get back comments that suggest the program committee misunderstood your abstract, you can use that information constructively. If the program committee misunderstood your work, other readers may misunderstand it as well. 

This note has placed a lot of emphasis on the idea that an extended abstract need to be clearly written and easy to understand. Of course, whenever possible that standard should be applied to full papers as well.

For additional advice, read the excellent article by Mark Wegman that inspired this report: ``What it's like to be a POPL referee; or How to write an extended abstract so that it is more likely to be accepted,'' SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 1986, pages 91-95.