Ideational grammatical metaphor is an important aspect of systemic functional linguistics as well as widely present in academic abstract. According to the classification of 13 types of ideational grammatical metaphors by Halliday, this paper probes into their characteristics in English abstracts of 30 electrical papers, and compares the differences of ideational grammatical metaphors used by Chinese scholars and native English scholars. In this study, it can be found that domestic electrical engineering scholars have the following problems in writing abstracts: overuse of nominalization, underuse of the verbalization of conjunction, insufficient use of some types and low lexical variation.