Setting the Stage: Title Page, Abstract, and Introduction

In this chapter, I examine the parts of a research report that set the stage for the description of how the study was carried out and what it found. The title and abstract alert potential readers to whether your study is related to the questions they need to have answered. The introduction section of the report places your work in a broader context and tells the reader why you think your work is important.

Title Page

Title

The title of your report should identify

• the main variables and theoretical issues under investigation,
• the relationships between them, and
• the population under study.

Shakespeare’s Juliet pleaded that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 43–44). What mattered most to her was not what something was called but rather the characteristics of its fragrance. However, in the reporting of science, a name can matter greatly. The title given to a research report will help (or obscure) readers’ understanding of the report’s relevance to their needs.

When you conduct a computerized search of the literature using PsycINFO, for example, the first thing you must do is choose your search terms. Then, you specify the list of document fields—the parts of the document and document record—the computer should scan to find the terms. In PsycINFO, this list contains many different document fields. Depending on your reference database, the first field listed may be “All Text,” but “Title” and “Abstract” are also listed as options. I suspect that these three fields are the most frequently used parameters for searches.

You might ask, “If my audience can search the full document, what difference does it make what terms are in the title?” The fact is that many, if not most, searchers will pass on the full document search. It will lead to the retrieval of too many documents that are not relevant to the question of interest, even if searchers use multiple keywords (and the Boolean command AND) to narrow the search down. For example, if a searcher is looking for research on roses, a full text search would include a study that contained the sentence, “The subjects then rose from their chairs and proceeded into an adjoining room.” Wading through all of the document records that include a specified term or terms anywhere in the text can take lots of time better spent otherwise. If terms appear in titles and abstracts, they are more likely to be central to the document content.

Suppose you just wrote a report about a study in which you examined the effects of full-day kindergarten on children’s academic achievement and psychological well-being. As you think about an appropriate title, you have a few things to consider. First, you would clearly want the terms full-day kindergarten, academic achievement, and psychological well-being in the title. However, what about specifying the comparison groups (e.g., half-day kindergarten, no kindergarten) against which full-day kindergarten’s effects were compared? Also, psychological well-being is a broad construct. It might subsume other constructs, such as happiness, self-confidence, and optimism, and these might have been among the measures you used. You would want readers interested in these narrower constructs to find your report. Therefore, to be fully explanatory, the title might read “Relative Effects of Full-Day Kindergarten Versus Half-Day and No Kindergarten on Children’s Academic Achievement and Psychological Well-Being, Including Happiness, Self-Confidence, and Optimism.”

This title is about twice the length recommended (12 words) by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.; APA, 2010, p. 23), so a briefer title is called for, perhaps something like “Effects of Full-Day Kindergarten on Academic Achievement and Psychological Well-Being.” Now your title is clear and concise (and contains information about the population of interest) but perhaps not precise. You might worry that searchers using the title alone and looking for studies on children’s happiness, self-concept, and/or optimism will miss your report. They will, but that is a trade-off you must make. However, you can minimize the chances your report will be missed by including the additional terms in the abstract. That way, searchers who use this broader level of document screening will find the report.

In picking the terms to include in your title, also consider what other terms might be used in the literature to refer to the same concept. For example, as you looked at the literature on the effects of full-day kindergarten, you might have discovered that some authors called it all-day kindergarten. It would be important to ensure that searchers using the term all-day kindergarten would retrieve your article. You should not put this alternative term in the title, but you can put it in the abstract, perhaps in parentheses after the first time full-day kindergarten is used. In constructing a title (and an abstract), it is important to consider these other labels to ensure that people who search on alternate terms for the same construct will find your report.

Authors are often tempted to think up catchy phrases to include in their titles. When searching was done by hand, this practice might have enticed readers to take a closer look at the article (and perhaps such phrases demonstrated how clever the author was). This practice has been diminishing in recent years. Authors are discovering that extraneous elements in a clever title are a nuisance to them when they conduct computer searches. Today, they want to save others from similar bother; with rare exceptions, clever titles only add to the number of irrelevant documents retrieved. For example, suppose you titled an article “A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet: The Effects of Labels on Subjective Evaluations.” The article would be retrieved by searches using the terms rose, smell, and sweet, terms unrelated to your article. Clever is OK if it communicates distinctive qualities of the study not captured elsewhere in the title, but you should be careful to avoid filling search engine results with irrelevant documents.¹

List of Authors

Under the title on the first page of your manuscript, you list the authors in the order of their relative contribution to the research and research report. This is not mentioned in the Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS; Appelbaum et al., 2018), perhaps because it is so obvious. This author acknowledgment should also list the complete affiliations of the researchers at the time the study was conducted.

The Publication Manual (6th ed.; APA, 2010, pp. 18–19) and the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (APA Ethics Code; APA, 2017) provide guidance about who should get authorship credit and in what order. I have reproduced the relevant section from the APA Ethics Code in Exhibit 2.1. A more extensive treatment of authorship issues can be found in Cooper (2016).

 Exhibit 2.1. 

Excerpt From Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct Regarding Authorship Credit

8.12 Publication Credit

(a) Psychologists take responsibility and credit, including authorship credit, only for work they have actually performed or to which they have substantially contributed. (See also Standard 8.12b, Publication Credit.)

(b) Principal authorship and other publication credits accurately reflect the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their relative status. Mere possession of an institutional position, such as department chair, does not justify authorship credit. Minor contributions to the research or to the writing for publications are acknowledged appropriately, such as in footnotes or in an introductory statement.

(c) Except under exceptional circumstances, a student is listed as principal author on any multiple-authored article that is substantially based on the student’s doctoral dissertation. Faculty advisors discuss publication credit with students as early as feasible and throughout the research and publication process as appropriate. (See also Standard 8.12b, Publication Credit.)

Note. From Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2002, Amended June 1, 2010 and January 1, 2017), by the American Psychological Association, 2017 (http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx). Copyright 2017 by the American Psychological Association.

Author Note

The author note of your report should

• provide registration information about the study, if it was submitted to a research register;
• describe prior use of the data in published articles, dissertation or thesis, and conference presentations;
• acknowledge contributions to your study besides authorship, including sources of funding;
• reveal potential conflicts of interest;
• present the current affiliations of all authors if they are different from when the study was conducted;
• provide contact information for the corresponding author; and
• include any other information of importance to the reader that may not be included elsewhere.

Also on the title page you will put an author note (APA, 2010, pp. 24–25). The first paragraph of an author note contains

• the study’s registration information, if it appears in a research register, and
• any changes of affiliation if any author now works elsewhere.

In an author note you will list a research register and the number readers will need to find the study if you took the commendable step of submitting your work to a publicly available, searchable database. Research is typically registered before data collection begins. The registered information about the study includes the plans you made for what and how to collect data (called a research protocol) before you began conducting the study. These registers alert others to what research is currently under way. This can be very helpful if someone else is considering doing a study similar to your own. It also helps users see how your study methods might have changed from the way you planned them to the way the study was actually carried out. It also makes research easier to find once it is completed in case it is not yet published (or may never be published). You should consider examining relevant study registers for similar research and registering your study before you begin.

The second paragraph of the author note contains information about whether the data in the study

• were also used in other publications or presentations at conferences or conventions and where these publications can be found and/or
• were used in a master’s thesis or dissertation and where this document can be found.

In the second paragraph, you also disclose the written, public venues through which the data or other unique ideas of your report have appeared previously.² Thus, if the study served as all or part of your master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, or if any written version of it is publicly archived (e.g., report to a funding agency), you need to say so in the author note. Such an acknowledgment might read, “This study served as Romeo Montague’s doctoral dissertation at Capulet University.” Typically, you do not have to report oral presentations of the study at meetings or conferences unless the proceedings of the conference have also appeared in print.

It is critical to acknowledge that your data were previously reported in public documents. If you do not make this acknowledgment, you could be open to a charge of an ethical violation. The APA Ethics Code (APA, 2017) states, “Psychologists do not publish, as original data, data that have been previously published. This does not preclude republishing data when they are accompanied by proper acknowledgment” (Standard 8.13, p. 12). For example, you should disclose in the author note if

• your study includes an analysis of longitudinal data and the first wave of data collection was published previously or
• the data are part of a larger data set, portions of which were published previously.

This acknowledgment should be made whether or not the measures in your new report overlap with measures previously reported. The data still share many things in common with those in the original report—for example, the same participants, data collectors, settings, and timing.

Why is this important? The Publication Manual spells this out clearly (6th ed.; APA, 2010, pp. 13–15, section 1.09, Duplicate and Piecemeal Publication of Data). Briefly, duplicate publication can (a) distort the scientific record by making a finding appear to have been replicated when this is not the case, (b) take up space that precludes the publication of other worthy reports, and/or (c) violate copyright laws. Read section 1.09 of the Publication Manual carefully. If your course of action is still not clear, contact the editor of the journal you want to submit to and ask for guidance.

A third paragraph of the author note contains

• acknowledgment of people who assisted in conducting the study (e.g., through labor, expertise) but were not contributors in a way that led to authorship,
• sources of funding or other support, and
• any relationships or affiliations that might be perceived as a conflict of interest.

When someone has contributed to the research but not at a level that warrants authorship, acknowledge this person in the author note. Typically, the acknowledgment begins with “We thank [person’s name],” followed by a brief description of the nature of the contribution. For example, “We thank Lord Montague for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript,” or “We thank Lady Capulet for assistance with statistical analyses.”

The second acknowledgment goes to sources of support for the study other than the labor or expertise of an individual. If the study being reported was conducted with monetary or other forms of material support, acknowledge this in the author note. With regard to funding, some funding agencies require that they be acknowledged in this way; other funding agencies request that they not be acknowledged. Check with your funder before writing your author note. Also include the name of the person to whom the funds were awarded and the award number. This helps readers who want to follow up on the history of your work.³ Your funder may also request a disclaimer indicating that the research does not reflect the views of the funding organization. The portion of the author note that acknowledges monetary support might read something like this: “This research was supported by Grant 123456 from the Juliet Capulet Foundation to Romeo Montague. However, the research reported does not necessarily reflect the views of the Juliet Capulet Foundation.”

Also, sometimes support comes in forms other than money. For example, a shopping mall might have permitted you to set up a table to collect data from shoppers; a community center might have provided a room for interviewing participants; or other researchers might have given you access to equipment, stimulus materials, or measures they used in a previous study. All of these in-kind contributions to the study should be acknowledged with the consent of the provider, of course. Such an acknowledgment might read as follows: “Thanks are extended to Capulet Pharmacy for providing the fragrances used in this study.” Of course, you should be careful that the acknowledgment does not reveal anything that might compromise the confidentiality of the participants in your study.

Next in the author note, disclose any possible conflicts of interest. Typically, a conflict of interest involves economic or commercial interests you or your coauthors have in the products or services used or discussed in the report. Again, the Publication Manual contains a discussion that will help you decide whether a potential conflict of interest exists (6th ed.; APA, 2010, pp. 17–18, section 1.12, Conflict of Interest). Consult the Publication Manual as well as the editor of the journal you are submitting to if questions linger.

In the matters of both previous publication and conflict of interest, I suggest that you err on the side of caution: If you have any concern about either of these issues, say so in the author note when you first submit your article. If your concern is immaterial, it is easier to remove this information later on than to explain its omission if it is later deemed important. Also, when you submit your manuscript to an APA journal (and others as well), you will be asked to verify on a form that you have complied with APA’s ethical guidelines and disclosed any potential conflicts of interest.

Your author note might also be the place to provide information that is relevant to how your study was carried out that does not fit anywhere else in the report. This is a catchall suggestion that you will rarely use. It does help emphasize, however, the importance of full disclosure.

A final paragraph of the author note contains information about how to contact the author who has taken responsibility for corresponding with readers who want more information. This information typically includes the mailing and e-mail addresses.

Abstract

The abstract of your report should provide a concise summary of

• the problem under investigation, including the main hypotheses;
• participants or subjects, specifying their most important characteristics, including, in animal research, their genus and species;
• the study’s method, including
  • research design (e.g., experiment, observational study),
  • sample size,
  • materials and any apparatus used (e.g., instruments and apparatus),
  • outcome measures, and
  • data-gathering procedures;
• findings, including effect sizes, confidence intervals, and statistical significance levels; and
• conclusions, implications, and applications.

The Publication Manual (6th ed.; APA, 2010, pp. 25–27, section 2.05, Abstract) points out that the abstract to your report “can be the most important single paragraph in an article” (p. 26). I have already noted that the abstract is important because, for many researchers, its content will determine whether your article is retrieved in a computer-assisted literature search. Once retrieved, it is the first thing (perhaps the only thing) about your study that will be read. The Publication Manual says the abstract should be dense with information as well as accurate, nonevaluative (i.e., stick to the facts, no judgments), coherent, readable, and concise.

The elements of an abstract called for by JARS are fairly self-explanatory. As examples of good abstracts, I have reproduced in Figure 2.1 two abstracts along with the other material that appears on the first page of a published article for studies from two different areas of psychology. Note first that they both meet the length restrictions of the journals in which they appeared. These restrictions typically range from 150 to 250 words. Note also that the example abstract taken from Bricker et al. (2009) uses five boldface headings to highlight information about the study. The five headings correspond nicely to the information called for in JARS. This type of abstract is called a structured abstract, and it is commonly found in the medical sciences. The editors of the journals that APA publishes are free to adopt this style for articles on empirical studies, so it is not surprising, then, that you will see this structured format used frequently in journals like Health Psychology. Its purpose is to ensure that authors include the important information in the abstract.

 Figure 2.1. Examples of Abstracts and Keywords in APA Journals

Both example abstracts succinctly describe the problem under investigation. Burgmans et al. (2009) did so in three sentences, whereas Bricker et al. (2009) used just one. Then, each abstract introduces the principal design feature of the study and the important characteristics of the sample of participants. Bricker et al. did not actually mention that their study was a population-based longitudinal study, but this is clear from the title. Burgmans et al. mentioned the important apparatus they used for collecting data (magnetic resonance imaging), whereas Bricker et al. discussed the outcome variables collected by their measures. Each example abstract then presents the major findings. Bricker et al. presented some statistical results and probability levels associated with the findings (as called for in JARS), whereas Burgmans et al. did not (their article did contain results of t tests and effect size estimates that could have been included in the abstract).⁴ Finally, each abstract concludes with a sentence or two that interpret the findings.

A final point: Both example abstracts are followed by keywords that can also be used to identify the reports for a literature search. In fact, all authors publishing in APA journals are required to supply keywords for their articles. Note that some keywords in the examples are redundant with terms that appear in the title or abstract and others are not. Still other terms appear in the abstract that are not in the title or keywords that could very likely be the object of reference database searches. I would suggest that for Bricker et al. (2009) theory of triadic influence and achievement motivation and for Burgmans et al. (2009) dementia, among others, also be added as keywords.

Introduction

The introduction to your report should include

• a statement of the problem under study and its theoretical or practical importance (especially public health implications);
• a succinct review of relevant scholarship, including
  • its relation to previous work and
  • if the data in this study have been reported on previously, how the current study differs from these earlier studies;
• a statement of the research hypotheses, including
  • the theories or other means used to derive them,
  • which hypotheses are primary or secondary, and
  • other planned analyses; and
• a statement regarding how the hypotheses and research design are related to one another.

The elements of the introduction section that are contained in JARS correspond neatly with the text in the Publication Manual (6th ed.; APA, 2010, pp. 27–28, section 2.05, Introduction). The Publication Manual asks five questions that you need to answer at the beginning of your report:

• Why is this problem important?
• How does the study relate to previous work in the area? . . .
• What are the primary and secondary hypotheses and objectives of the study, and what, if any, are the links to theory?
• How do the hypotheses and research design relate to one another?
• What are the theoretical and practical implications of the study? (APA, 2010, p. 27)

Because most of these are self-explanatory, here I focus on only two elements of JARS: (a) stating whether hypotheses are primary or secondary or analyses are planned but with no associated hypotheses and (b) describing the relationship between the hypotheses and the choice of research design.

Primary and Secondary Hypotheses and Other Planned Analyses

It is important to group hypotheses into those of primary interest and secondary interest. Doing this assists you and your readers in interpreting the results. This is especially critical with regard to the outcomes of statistical tests. For example, suppose you conducted a study concerning the effects of labels on people’s evaluations of fragrances or perfumes. For a random half of the subjects, you labeled a fragrance (rated as “mildly pleasing” in previous tests) roses, and for the other half, you labeled it manure. After smelling the fragrance, you asked subjects to rate it along, say, five dimensions (e.g., one of which might have been pleasant–unpleasant). Your primary hypothesis (contrary to Juliet’s prediction that you would uncover a null finding) was that the scent labeled roses would be rated as more pleasant than the same one labeled manure.

In addition, you asked subjects questions about whether they would purchase the perfume, recommend it to a friend, and so on. For these measures, you are less confident you will find an effect of the label because you think the effect itself is not large and other considerations may obscure its impact. For example, intention to buy might be influenced by how much money subjects have as well as their liking of the fragrance. Or subjects might already have a favorite fragrance. Therefore, intention to buy might be of interest to you but only as a secondary consideration; this hypothesis is secondary to your primary interest.

In your study, you also did some exploratory analyses by breaking your data down into subgroups and looking for interactions, for example, by examining whether the labeling effect is greater for male or female subjects. You have no real predictions about what the outcome of the test might be, but you are interested in possible effects, perhaps to guide future research. If you found that female subjects were more affected by the label than male subjects, why might this be so? You could speculate on this and call for the findings to be replicated to test your new hypothesis.

By dividing your hypotheses a priori into primary and secondary concerns and designating others as exploratory, you accomplish two things. First, suppose you had no a priori groupings of hypotheses. You ran a total of 20 t tests (on 20 dependent variables) pitting the null hypothesis against some alternative. You found that three tests proved significant (p < .05). Given that we would expect one significant result even if all of your numbers were generated by chance, this is not a terribly impressive result.⁵ (Juliet would be vindicated.) However, suppose all three significant findings were obtained on your three primary measures and all in the predicted direction. Now a more convincing argument for your hypothesis can be made.

Also, because the other 17 statistical tests have been labeled secondary or exploratory, readers know to interpret these results in a different context. If the intent to purchase measure does not prove significant, readers know that a priori you viewed this test as less diagnostic of your main hypothesis. Conversely, if you find male and female subjects did differ in the effect of the label, you will have to provide a post hoc explanation for why one sex was more affected than the other. This after-the-fact explanation will need further testing before it gains the credibility that your study bestowed on your primary hypotheses. In this way, an a priori grouping of hypotheses helps both you and your audience interpret your results.⁶

Relationship Between Your Hypotheses and Research Design

It is also important in the introduction section to briefly explain your research design and why the design is well suited to answer your research question. So, for example, if your research question addresses a causal relationship (e.g., does the label of a fragrance cause people to react to it differently?), an experimental or quasi-experimental research design is appropriate for answering it. If the question relates to a simple association (are labels for fragrances that are rated more positively associated with more positive reactions to the fragrance itself?), then a simple correlational analysis may provide the answer. If you are interested in how people differ, then a between-subjects design is called for. If your interest is in how people change over time, then a within-subjects design is most appropriate.

JARS recommends that you provide your audience with an analysis of the fit between your research question and research design in the introduction to your article. Why did you pick this design to answer this question? How well can this design answer the question? Answers to these questions will be critical to readers’ evaluation of your article. If you ask a causal question but your design does not support a causal interpretation, you have made a mistake. By setting this out explicitly in the introduction, you will be less likely to make an inferential error, and your readers will be less likely to misinterpret your results.

On occasion, your intentions (the design you hoped to carry out) will be thwarted by the realities you face in conducting the study. For example, a lot of subjects might withdraw from the condition that asks them to sniff manure whereas few withdraw from the roses condition, suggesting that the subjects in the two conditions were different before the experiment began. In the end, your hoped-for inferences and design will not match up. In such cases, you need to describe these problems in the Method section (which I turn to in Chapters 3 and 4) and address their implications in the Discussion section (which I discuss in Chapter 7).

¹Many authors begin their introduction with a quotation. This might be a good way to use the quotation from Ms. Capulet.

²APA has teamed up with the Center for Open Science to create PsyArXiv (https://psyarxiv.com/), a website where scholars can post documents—such as working papers, unpublished works, and articles under review (preprints)—making them accessible to other researchers and the public at no cost.

³In addition to serving as thanks to your funder, notes about your funding sources will help readers interested in your work who are looking for sources of support. Your grant history will help them see who is funding research related to their own.

⁴Note as well that I have not updated the abstracts to meet the current requirements of APA Style as set forth in the sixth edition of the Publication Manual (APA, 2010). So, for example, Bricker et al.’s (2009) abstract reports two null hypothesis tests as p < .05 and p < .001. Under the new guidelines, these p levels would be reported precisely, using p = rather than p <. At the time of the appearance of Bricker et al.’s article, what they did was perfectly acceptable.

⁵You may be familiar with the notion of experiment-wise error rates. This refers to the fact that because you have conducted more than one statistical comparison, the probability that you will get at least one false rejection of the null hypothesis is greater than the probability associated with each individual comparison. The more tests you do, the more likely an experiment-wise error will occur.

⁶Another way to address the issue of experiment-wise error would be to combine your related measures, perhaps through factor analysis, so that you do fewer tests. The optimal strategy to address experiment-wise error may be to do both: Combine related measures, and group the combined measures on the basis of their primary or secondary status.