In an ideal world, scientific papers wouldn't have abstracts.
There'd be no need for them, because every ideal scientist would have the time to read every published paper in full, and a perfect memory for all of the details. Sadly we don't inhabit such a world, so abstracts are perhaps the most important part of a manuscript - certainly so, in proportion to the word count. The bottom line is, if you as an author want citations for your paper, you need a good abstract. Yet abstracts often go wrong. In my opinion (and I read a lot of the things),
an abstract should not contain...
Prologue. Many good abstracts begin in media res, describing the methods with no introduction at all. Alternatively, a concise intro can work, but this should be limited to explaining the question that the study set out to answer. A list of prior findings is ...
