Take the 2-minute tour ×

I am writing an abstract for a paper, where I say the following:

"In contrast to previous work, our method does not rely on ...."

Then, about three sentences later, I would like to use a similar construct

"In contrast to previous work, where problem X is usually approached this way ...."

These constructs are useful to quickly highlight the contributions of your work in the abstract, but I would prefer avoiding the repetition of the exact same words, since the two sentences are close enough to each other in the text.

Can anybody think of a compact way of rephrasing either of these two sentences (without changing the structure of the text much) ?

share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Without a bit more context, it's hard to say how good a fit it would be, but something like

Unlike prior efforts, our method does not rely on...

share|improve this answer
That's excellent! Just to clarify, I did not provide more context mostly because I wanted constructs that were not context-aware (i.e. as general as possible). Thanks! –  user815423426 Feb 14 '11 at 17:13
Language isn't "general"; it's all in the context. –  Jürgen A. Erhard Feb 14 '11 at 17:19
@AmV - glad I could help. –  Dusty Feb 14 '11 at 17:41

Other possibilities

Our method introduces the element of....

or even

We pioneer the use of...

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


