ANSI/NISO Z39.14 (Guidelines for Abstracts)

ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2015), Guidelines for Abstracts, is an American National Standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) that gives authors and editors guidance on writing abstracts for research publications and other scholarly works -- specifically, texts reporting the results of experimental work or descriptive or discursive studies. It is a guideline, not a mandatory format: it does not set a single fixed word limit or template that every abstract must follow. Instead it covers where an abstract should be placed in a publication, the different types of abstracts and what content each type is expected to cover, document-type-specific abstracting recommendations, style guidance, and worked examples. A document's abstracting practice can be described as following Z39.14 when it applies this general guidance -- consistent placement, content coverage matched to abstract type, and a style suited to standalone use by abstracting and indexing services -- rather than any one publisher's or journal's own house-style abstract instructions.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A journal's author guidelines cite Z39.14-derived practice when they tell authors an abstract must be able to stand alone -- understandable without reading the full article -- because the same text will be reused verbatim by abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases that a reader may encounter before ever seeing the full paper.

Is an instance

A technical report series applies Z39.14's document-type guidance by placing the abstract on its own page immediately after the title page, distinct from an executive summary or introduction, so that indexing services and report repositories can reliably locate and extract it as a single, separable block of text.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A single journal's specific structured-abstract template -- say, a mandatory Background/Methods/Results/Conclusions format with a hard 250-word cap set by that journal's editorial policy (as ICMJE-aligned journals commonly require) -- is that journal's own house style, not Z39.14 itself. Z39.14 is the general national guideline abstracting and indexing practice draws on; individual publishers, journals, and standards like ICMJE's recommendations layer their own stricter, format-specific requirements on top of it.

ANSI/NISO Z39.14 — full title Guidelines for Abstracts, currently in force as ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2015) — is an American National Standard, developed and maintained by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), that guides authors and editors in writing abstracts for research publications and other scholarly works. It was first approved in 1997 and has since been periodically reaffirmed without substantive revision — most recently in 2015 — meaning the underlying guidance NISO’s voting membership last substantively approved is now nearly three decades old, though it remains NISO’s live, current standard on the topic (ISSN 1041-5653; DOI 10.3789/ansi.niso.z39.14-1997R2015).

What the standard covers

Z39.14 is deliberately a guideline, not a rigid template mandated across all publishing. Rather than fixing a single required word count or section structure, it addresses:

Placement — where an abstract belongs relative to the rest of a publication, so it can be located and extracted consistently.
Types of abstracts — the standard describes different categories of abstract and the content each is expected to cover, reflecting the long-standing library- and information-science distinction between an indicative abstract (describes what the document is about, without stating findings) and an informative abstract (summarizes the actual content, methods, and results, able to substitute for reading the full text on many practical questions).
Document-type-specific recommendations — guidance tailored to different kinds of texts, since an abstract for a research article, a technical report, and a conference paper serve overlapping but not identical purposes.
Style — guidance on how an abstract should be written so it reads clearly as a standalone piece of text, separated from its source document.
Worked examples demonstrating the guidance in practice.

Because Z39.14 does not prescribe one universal word limit, the specific length caps researchers actually encounter — a journal’s 250-word structured-abstract limit, a conference’s 300-word plain-abstract limit, a funder’s line-count limit on a project summary — come from the individual publisher, journal, or funder layering its own house-style requirement on top of the general guideline, not from Z39.14 itself. See CASRAI’s Structured Abstract Format guide for how ICMJE, CONSORT, and PRISMA each specify their own structured-abstract subheadings, and the Abstract term for the general concept.

Why the standard exists: abstracting and indexing

Z39.14’s guidance is oriented toward a specific downstream use: abstracting and indexing (A&I). Before full-text search made an entire paper searchable, and still today wherever a reader encounters a citation before the full text, the abstract is what a reader, a database, or an indexing service actually sees first — and often the only text a database stores and searches directly, independent of the full article. A well-formed abstract, per Z39.14’s guidance, needs to function as a self-contained unit: understandable on its own, accurately representing the document’s content, and written so that A&I services (library databases, subject indexes, current-awareness services) can extract and reuse it without distortion. This is the same underlying purpose that motivates graphical abstracts and journal-specific structured-abstract requirements: different mechanisms aimed at the same goal of making a document’s content discoverable and evaluable before a reader commits to the full text.

Relationship to other NISO standards

Z39.14 sits within NISO’s broader family of information-standards work rather than functioning in isolation. It is a content/authoring guideline focused specifically on abstract writing, distinct from standards that govern document structure or interchange more broadly — for example NISO Z39.98, the Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing, which defines a modular XML architecture for accessible publishing rather than abstract content or style. It is likewise distinct from vocabulary-control standards such as ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (Controlled Vocabularies and Thesauri), which governs the indexing terms applied to a document rather than the abstract text itself — though both standards ultimately serve the same broader abstracting-and-indexing ecosystem.

Practical scope for CASRAI’s audience

Research administrators, editors, and authors are more likely to encounter Z39.14’s influence indirectly — in a journal’s or publisher’s own abstract-writing instructions, in library-science teaching on indicative versus informative abstracts, or in institutional repository and technical-report style guides — than to consult the standard document itself. Its main practical value is as the underlying national-standard reference behind the general expectation that an abstract should stand alone, accurately represent the work, and be structured for reliable extraction by abstracting and indexing services, distinct from any single journal’s specific word-count or subheading requirements.

References

NISO, ANSI/NISO Z39.14-1997 (R2015), Guidelines for Abstracts — niso.org/publications/ansiniso-z3914-1997-r2015-guidelines-abstracts

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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