Suggestions for Submitting Paper Abstracts for TPRC52!

As the Call for Papers for TPRC52 is released this month, I was asked to provide some insight into what makes a great abstract likely to be accepted as part of a TPRC conference. The thinking behind this request, I believe, is that my recent 2-year stint as the Program Committee Chair might be useful for helping others, particularly graduate students new to the conference, in creating paper abstracts that are likely to be accepted for the conference. Let me try to provide a short list of suggestions that should improve the chances of your abstract being accepted this year.

To begin, recognize that your TPRC abstract should be customized for a specific audience with a focused agenda, which in this case is the TPRC Program Committee who are seeking to assemble a compelling interdisciplinary policy research conference. At 500 words, TPRC abstracts are a bit longer than an abstract for a typical academic journal article. As you’ll see below, I suggest you take advantage of this by providing additional details on the interdisciplinary research methodology employed to answer your research questions. Also, TPRC abstracts usually are written before the actual paper has been completed, which means you need to clearly describe your expected results without over-promising the scope or impact of expected results. A common flaw in unsuccessful abstracts is expected results that cannot be reasonably derived by the stated methodology or length of a typical TPRC paper.

In reviewing your paper proposal, the Program Committee will usually start by first looking for a clear statement of the research question you will answer with your paper. This should be stated in as clear a fashion as possible (i.e., the research question of this paper is…) rather than through some type of inference from a general discussion of the research problem. Your abstract should provide a short discussion of why your research question is timely, novel, and addresses an important issue within the technology policy arena. This also provides an opportunity to cite prior interdisciplinary research or policy developments that lend credibility to your proposal. Such references are important since the truncated length of the abstract precludes room for a structured literature review. Instead, you need to take advantage of discussions such as the importance or novelty of the research question to provide references that demonstrate the necessary subject matter expertise on the research topic.

Program Committee reviewers next will likely focus upon the research methodology employed to answer your research question. Here you need to identify whether your approach is qualitative or quantitative, the structure of your framework used to generate your analysis, and the source or format of data to be used. Recognizing the interdisciplinary focus of TPRC, this is an area to impress the reviewers by employing analytical tools from different disciplines to bring new or innovative insights into pressing policy issues of current concern. Bottom line is that you need to provide convincing reasons why your research methodology will be successful in tackling your research problem. References to prior work employing your research methodology can provide persuasive evidence to support your proposal.

The final major element included in your abstract should be to discuss results expected to be obtained by employing your research methodology to the research question. As I noted above, you need to be careful to not overstate the likely results from your analysis by implying findings that are very broad in scope or policy impact. This is a problem that I have seen from many proposed abstracts, often from graduate students submitting for the first time to the conference. Reviewers will mark down proposals that obviously overstate the likely impact of the analysis based upon the described research methodology. Consequently, make sure that you give adequate thought to reasonable expectations for the novelty of your findings, and avoid grandiose statements of the expected impact of any results or contributions of the analysis.

In summary, for a successful abstract, you should focus on delivering the following elements in your abstract: 1) a solid description of the research question that is timely, 2) the fit and rationale for an interdisciplinary research methodology employed to best answer your research question, and 3) a reasonable set of expected results tied to your research question and successful application of your research methodology. In my experience, some of the best reviewers literally have a check list for each of these items that must be checked in order to be given a favorable rating.

If you can include these elements in your abstract, then you should be well on your way to submitting an abstract that will be successful in gaining acceptance to the next TPRC conference!

Good luck!

Dr. David Reed is a Scholar in Residence in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was previously the TPRC Program Committee Chair and currently serves on the Board of Directors.