What does the abstract counter do?
It counts words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces and sentences as you type, compares the chosen count with your limit, and breaks the word count down by labeled section. The text stays in your browser.
How to use it
- Paste your title and abstract.
- Choose what the call limits (words or characters) and enter the limit.
- Decide whether the title counts toward the limit.
- Edit until the meter turns green, then use Copy or Download .txt.
The formatting tools
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Clean up spacing and line breaks | Fixes text pasted from PDFs: joins broken lines, collapses spaces, keeps paragraphs |
| Straight quotes and dashes | Converts curly quotes, en and em dashes and ellipses to plain characters some submission systems require |
| Title Case the title | Capitalizes major words, keeps short words lowercase and leaves acronyms and gene names (DNA, p53, mRNA) alone |
| Sentence case the title | Lowercases everything after the first word except acronyms and mixed-case terms |
Proper nouns aren't detected automatically in sentence case, so recheck names of places, organisms and people after using it.
Tips for hitting the limit
Cut the opening line about the importance of the field, merge methods into one or two sentences, and keep numbers in the results. The section counts help you see where the words went; a common pattern is too many in Background and too few in Results. Our abstract and poster guide has more.
Questions people ask
How does the counter define a word?
Any run of characters between spaces that contains at least one letter or number. Hyphenated terms count as one word; a dash surrounded by spaces doesn't count. Submission systems differ slightly, so leave a small margin.
Does it count the title?
Only if you tick "Count the title too". The title's own word and character counts always show under the title box.
What does "Clean up spacing" change?
It joins lines broken in the middle of a paragraph, rejoins words split by a hyphen at a line end, collapses repeated spaces, removes spaces before punctuation and keeps blank lines between paragraphs. If your text has a real hyphen at a line break, check that word afterward.