Writing Science: The Abstract is Poetry, the Paper is Prose.

The author reflects on the similarities of an abstract of a scientific paper to a poetry. He says that like a limerick, the best abstracts are quite irreverent. He adds that the quadripartite rules for the abstract, which include the background information and the results, have their parallels in the verse pattern of the quatrain. According to him, adding controls to the abstract would lead to a short, five-member composition that would work like a limerick.