An abstract is usually found at the beginning of a scientific research article. It is a brief summary of the study. You can think of it as the movie trailer – you watch the trailer to the movie to determine whether you want to go see the whole movie. When you read the abstract, you are determining whether or not you are interested in reading the rest of the article. While an abstract is often the very first part of a scientific article, it is the last part to be written. All academic journals have slightly different requirements for their abstracts.

For this section of your scientific project, you are expected to create an abstract of your entire self-experiment. This final piece of your project should be written in past tense, as you are reporting on an experiment that you have already completed. Your abstract must not exceed 250 words.