Writing a good abstract can be difficult, but there are some helpful tools here. First, the abstract can be seen as a minimal version of the paper, and should follow a pattern similar to IMRaD. A way to achieve this is to do a “structured abstract”, separating the abstract into sections.
- Background
- Objective
- Method
- Results
- Limitations
- Conclusion
The Background and Objective are the Introduction, Limitations are the Validity Threats, and Conclusion is the Discussion. Be as specific for the Results as possible, “we made X better” is of no use to anyone.
The selected venue may prohibit section names, and some reviewers hate them anyway. In that case, just comment those lines out, and keep the rest of the text.
Use as many keywords as possible, as this both makes the paper more likely to be found by search engines, and makes it easier for the reader to see if it is relevant.
However, there a couple of things that should be avoided.
- Arguments. That belongs in the Introduction, CARS move 2.
- References. No. Just no.