There are basically two tenses in Chinese: simple present tense and simple past tense.

Because academic papers are usually written in the simple present tense, abstracts are also written in the simple present tense. The purpose, methods, results and conclusions are mostly in the simple present tense, and the background introduction is mostly in the simple past tense.

The simple present tense is used to describe the research purpose and scope, research content, results and conclusions; The simple past tense is used to describe the work done by the author before writing a paper, and it can also be used to convey the reports, discussions and research contents of published documents.

Voice and person advocate passive voice. Because using passive voice can not only omit the actor, but also avoid the appearance of "we"

Expression, you can also take things that need to be emphasized as the subject, highlight its status, and help explain the facts. English abstracts often use the passive voice of the third person, which can avoid mentioning the relevant performers and make the writing appear objective.

At the same time, sentences in passive voice have a large room for adjustment in structure, which is conducive to the use of appropriate rhetorical devices, the expansion of noun phrases and the expansion of sentence information. But sometimes the active voice is more concise in structure than the passive voice.

English abstract

According to the requirements of EI, a good English abstract should answer the following four questions:

1) Do whatever you want (purpose),

2) How did you do it (method),

3) What results have been obtained and what conclusions can be drawn (results and conclusions); ?

4) What's unique about your paper?