APA abstract format refers to an article or document that talks about a summarized content for psychological studies.  It would allow people to go trough the contents of the journal to retrieve the context all psychology related journals except the contemporary ones would require an abstract.  Abstract contains the brief and the most concise essentials of the article.  Just like choosing the right movie, when you go to a record store and browse trough shelves of movie titles, you would wonder what the other titles that you haven't seen yet looks like or what the story of the movie is all about.  The back portion of the DVD case would tell you a brief summary of the movie, it is called an abstract.  The same idea applies to the APA abstract documents, the articles related to psychology subjects are most often long and takes forever to finish reading.  But with an abstract you would have a shorter version of the article and you would be able to finish reading it in the shortest time possible, along with that is being able to comprehend the most essential information about the subject.

Each abstract must contain several keywords to enable easier search ability for the users.  The abstract has to be self-contained, readable and organized and not to mention that it has to be loaded with all the key information on it.  The concise nature of the abstract was derived from being subject-specific, so if you are making an abstract yourself, you would have to follow certain rules about it to make it concise.  The beginning sentence has to retain the main essence of the article.  It has to be limited to a maximum of 120 words or approximately 960 characters including spaces.  Repeating the title in the beginning sentence would only waste the space provided for you it must only include the concept, implications and findings.  Self-contained characteristics are defined as abbreviations except for measurements and acronyms.  When mentioning the name of the drug it has to be in generic, it is because most drugs have a long name so a generic term would be helpful.   Accuracy is a key to an effective abstract construction, with much respect from the source manuscript all key information has to be displayed in the abstract.  Do not forget to mention the author with its initials and surname.  It would be helpful to compare the original article's headings to confirm accuracy in the abstract.