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When writing a summary, the goal is to compose a concise and objective overview of the original article. The summary should focus only on the article's main ideas and important details that support those ideas.

Guidelines for summarizing an article:

• State the main ideas.
• Identify the most important details that support the main ideas.
• Summarize in your own words.
• Do not copy phrases or sentences unless they are being used as direct quotations.
• Express the underlying meaning of the article, but do not critique or analyze.
• The summary should be about one third the length of the original article. 

Your summary should include:

• Give an overview of the article, including the title and the name of the author.
• Provide a thesis statement that states the main idea of the article.
• Use the body paragraphs to explain the supporting ideas of your thesis statement.
• One-paragraph summary - one sentence per supporting detail, providing 1-2 examples for each.
• Multi-paragraph summary - one paragraph per supporting detail, providing 2-3 examples for each.
• Start each paragraph with a topic sentence.
• Use transitional words and phrases to connect ideas.
• Summarize your thesis statement and the underlying meaning of the article.

 Adapted from "Guidelines for Using In-Text Citations in a Summary (or Research Paper)" by Christine Bauer-Ramazani, 2020

Additional Resources

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How to Write a Summary - Guide & Examples  (from Scribbr.com)

Writing a Summary  (from The University of Arizona Global Campus Writing Center)

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How to Write a Summary (Examples Included)

By Ashley Shaw

Have you ever recommended a book to someone and given them a quick overview? Then you’ve created a summary before!

Summarizing is a common part of everyday communication. It feels easy when you’re recounting what happened on your favorite show, but what do you do when the information gets a little more complex?

Written summaries come with their own set of challenges. You might ask yourself:

• What details are unnecessary?
• How do you put this in your own words without changing the meaning?
• How close can you get to the original without plagiarizing it?
• How long should it be?

The answers to these questions depend on the type of summary you are doing and why you are doing it.

A summary in an academic setting is different to a professional summary—and both of those are very different to summarizing a funny story you want to tell your friends.

One thing they all have in common is that you need to relay information in the clearest way possible to help your reader understand. We’ll look at some different forms of summary, and give you some tips on each.

Let’s get started!

What Is a Summary?

How do you write a summary, how do you write an academic summary, what are the four types of academic summaries, how do i write a professional summary, writing or telling a summary in personal situations, summarizing summaries.

A summary is a shorter version of a larger work. Summaries are used at some level in almost every writing task, from formal documents to personal messages.

When you write a summary, you have an audience that doesn’t know every single thing you know.

When you want them to understand your argument, topic, or stance, you may need to explain some things to catch them up.

Instead of having them read the article or hear every single detail of the story or event, you instead give them a brief overview of what they need to know.

Academic, professional, and personal summaries each require you to consider different things, but there are some key rules they all have in common.

Let’s go over a few general guides to writing a summary first.

1. A summary should always be shorter than the original work, usually considerably.

Even if your summary is the length of a full paper, you are likely summarizing a book or other significantly longer work.

2. A summary should tell the reader the highlights of what they need to know without giving them unnecessary details.

3. It should also include enough details to give a clear and honest picture.

For example, if you summarize an article that says “ The Office is the greatest television show of all time,” but don’t mention that they are specifically referring to sitcoms, then you changed the meaning of the article. That’s a problem! Similarly, if you write a summary of your job history and say you volunteered at a hospital for the last three years, but you don’t add that you only went twice in that time, it becomes a little dishonest.

4. Summaries shouldn’t contain personal opinion.

While in the longer work you are creating you might use opinion, within the summary itself, you should avoid all personal opinion. A summary is different than a review. In this moment, you aren’t saying what you think of the work you are summarizing, you are just giving your audience enough information to know what the work says or did.

Now that we have a good idea of what summaries are in general, let’s talk about some specific types of summary you will likely have to do at some point in your writing life.

An academic summary is one you will create for a class or in other academic writing. The exact elements you will need to include depend on the assignment itself.

However, when you’re asked for an academic summary, this usually this means one of five things, all of which are pretty similar:

• You need to do a presentation in which you talk about an article, book, or report.
• You write a summary paper in which the entire paper is a summary of a specific work.
• You summarize a class discussion, lesson, or reading in the form of personal notes or a discussion board post.
• You do something like an annotated bibliography where you write short summaries of multiple works in preparation of a longer assignment.
• You write quick summaries within the body of another assignment . For example, in an argumentative essay, you will likely need to have short summaries of the sources you use to explain their argument before getting into how the source helps you prove your point.

Regardless of what type of summary you are doing, though, there are a few steps you should always follow:

• Skim the work you are summarizing before you read it. Notice what stands out to you.
• Next, read it in depth . Do the same things stand out?
• Put the full text away and write in a few sentences what the main idea or point was.
• Go back and compare to make sure you didn’t forget anything.
• Expand on this to write and then edit your summary.

Each type of academic summary requires slightly different things. Let’s get down to details.

How Do I Write a Summary Paper?

Sometimes teachers assign something called a summary paper . In this, the entire thing is a summary of one article, book, story, or report.

To understand how to write this paper, let’s talk a little bit about the purpose of such an assignment.

A summary paper is usually given to help a teacher see how well a student understands a reading assignment, but also to help the student digest the reading. Sometimes, it can be difficult to understand things we read right away.

However, a good way to process the information is to put it in our own words. That is the point of a summary paper.

A summary paper is:

• A way to explain in our own words what happened in a paper, book, etc.
• A time to think about what was important in the paper, etc.
• A time to think about the meaning and purpose behind the paper, etc.

Here are some things that a summary paper is not:

• A review. Your thoughts and opinions on the thing you are summarizing don’t need to be here unless otherwise specified.
• A comparison. A comparison paper has a lot of summary in it, but it is different than a summary paper. In this, you are just saying what happened, but you aren’t saying places it could have been done differently.
• A paraphrase (though you might have a little paraphrasing in there). In the section on using summary in longer papers, I talk more about the difference between summaries, paraphrases, and quotes.

Because a summary paper is usually longer than other forms of summary, you will be able to chose more detail. However, it still needs to focus on the important events. Summary papers are usually shorter papers.

Let’s say you are writing a 3–4 page summary. You are likely summarizing a full book or an article or short story, which will be much longer than 3–4 pages.

Imagine that you are the author of the work, and your editor comes to you and says they love what you wrote, but they need it to be 3–4 pages instead.

How would you tell that story (argument, idea, etc.) in that length without losing the heart or intent behind it? That is what belongs in a summary paper.

How Do I Write Useful Academic Notes?

Sometimes, you need to write a summary for yourself in the form of notes or for your classmates in the form of a discussion post.

You might not think you need a specific approach for this. After all, only you are going to see it.

However, summarizing for yourself can sometimes be the most difficult type of summary. If you try to write down everything your teacher says, your hand will cramp and you’ll likely miss a lot.

Yet, transcribing doesn’t work because studies show that writing things down (not typing them) actually helps you remember them better.

So how do you find the balance between summarizing the lessons without leaving out important points?

There are some tips for this:

• If your professor writes it on the board, it is probably important.
• What points do your textbooks include when summarizing information? Use these as a guide.
• Write the highlight of every X amount of time, with X being the time you can go without missing anything or getting tired. This could be one point per minute, or three per five minutes, etc.

How Do I Create an Annotated Biography?

An annotated bibliography requires a very specific style of writing. Often, you will write these before a longer research paper . They will ask you to find a certain amount of articles and write a short annotation for each of them.

While an annotation is more than just a summary, it usually starts with a summary of the work. This will be about 2–3 sentences long. Because you don’t have a lot of room, you really have to think about what the most important thing the work says is.

This will basically ask you to explain the point of the article in these couple of sentences, so you should focus on the main point when expressing it.

Here is an example of a summary section within an annotation about this post:

“In this post, the author explains how to write a summary in different types of settings. She walks through academic, professional, and personal summaries. Ultimately, she claims that summaries should be short explanations that get the audience caught up on the topic without leaving out details that would change the meaning.”

Can I Write a Summary Within an Essay?

Perhaps the most common type of summary you will ever do is a short summary within a longer paper.

For example, if you have to write an argumentative essay, you will likely need to use sources to help support your argument.

However, there is a good chance that your readers won’t have read those same sources.

So, you need to give them enough detail to understand your topic without spending too much time explaining and not enough making your argument.

While this depends on exactly how you are using summary in your paper, often, a good amount of summary is the same amount you would put in an annotation.

Just a few sentences will allow the reader to get an idea of the work before moving on to specific parts of it that might help your argument.

What’s the Difference Between Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Using Quotes?

One important thing to recognize when using summaries in academic settings is that summaries are different than paraphrases or quotes.

A summary is broader and more general. A paraphrase, on the other hand, puts specific parts into your own words. A quote uses the exact words of the original. All of them, however, need to be cited.

Let’s look at an example:

Take these words by Thomas J. Watson:

”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t as all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.”

Let’s say I was told to write a summary, a paraphrase, and a quote about this statement. This is what it might look like:

Summary: Thomas J. Watson said that the key to success is actually to fail more often. (This is broad and doesn’t go into details about what he says, but it still gives him credit.)

Paraphrase: Thomas J. Watson, on asking if people would like his formula for success, said that the secret was to fail twice as much. He claimed that when you decide to learn from your mistakes instead of being disappointed by them, and when you start making a lot of them, you will actually find more success. (This includes most of the details, but it is in my own words, while still crediting the source.)

Quote: Thomas J. Watson said, ”Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure—or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that’s where you will find success.” (This is the exact words of the original with quotation marks and credit given.)

Avoiding Plagiarism

One of the hardest parts about summarizing someone else’s writing is avoiding plagiarism .

That’s why I have a few rules/tips for you when summarizing anything:

1. Always cite.

If you are talking about someone else’s work in any means, cite your source. If you are summarizing the entire work, all you probably need to do (depending on style guidelines) is say the author’s name. However, if you are summarizing a specific chapter or section, you should state that specifically. Finally, you should make sure to include it in your Work Cited or Reference page.

2. Change the wording.

Sometimes when people are summarizing or paraphrasing a work, they get too close to the original, and actually use the exact words. Unless you use quotation marks, this is plagiarism. However, a good way to avoid this is to hide the article while you are summarizing it. If you don’t have it in front of you, you are less likely to accidentally use the exact words. (However, after you are done, double check that you didn’t miss anything important or give wrong details.)

3. Use a plagiarism checker.

Of course, when you are writing any summary, especially academic summaries, it can be easy to cross the line into plagiarism. If this is a place where you struggle, then ProWritingAid can help.

Just use our Plagiarism Report . It’ll highlight any unoriginal text in your document so you can make sure you are citing everything correctly and summarizing in your own words.

Find out more about ProWritingAid plagiarism bundles.

Along with academic summaries, you might sometimes need to write professional summaries. Often, this means writing a summary about yourself that shows why you are qualified for a position or organization.

In this section, let’s talk about two types of professional summaries: a LinkedIn summary and a summary section within a resume.

How Do I Write My LinkedIn Bio?

LinkedIn is all about professional networking. It offers you a chance to share a brief glimpse of your professional qualifications in a paragraph or two.

This can then be sent to professional connections, or even found by them without you having to reach out. This can help you get a job or build your network.

Your summary is one of the first things a future employer might see about you, and how you write yours can make you stand out from the competition.

Here are some tips on writing a LinkedIn summary :

• Before you write it, think about what you want it to do . If you are looking for a job, what kind of job? What have you done in your past that would stand out to someone hiring for that position? That is what you will want to focus on in your summary.
• Be professional . Unlike many social media platforms, LinkedIn has a reputation for being more formal. Your summary should reflect that to some extent.
• Use keywords . Your summary is searchable, so using keywords that a recruiter might be searching for can help them find you.
• Focus on the start . LinkedIn shows the first 300 characters automatically, and then offers the viewer a chance to read more. Make that start so good that everyone wants to keep reading.
• Focus on accomplishments . Think of your life like a series of albums, and this is your speciality “Greatest Hits” album. What “songs” are you putting on it?

How Do I Summarize My Experience on a Resume?

Writing a professional summary for a resume is different than any other type of summary that you may have to do.

Recruiters go through a lot of resumes every day. They don’t have time to spend ages reading yours, which means you have to wow them quickly.

To do that, you might include a section at the top of your resume that acts almost as an elevator pitch: That one thing you might say to a recruiter to get them to want to talk to you if you only had a 30-second elevator ride.

If you don’t have a lot of experience, though, you might want to skip this section entirely and focus on playing up the experience you do have.

Outside of academic and personal summaries, you use summary a lot in your day-to-day life.

Whether it is telling a good piece of trivia you just learned or a funny story that happened to you, or even setting the stage in creative writing, you summarize all the time.

How you use summary can be an important consideration in whether people want to read your work (or listen to you talk).

Here are some things to think about when telling a story:

• Pick interesting details . Too many and your point will be lost. Not enough, and you didn’t paint the scene or give them a complete idea about what happened.
• Play into the emotions . When telling a story, you want more information than the bare minimum. You want your reader to get the emotion of the story. That requires a little bit more work to accomplish.
• Focus. A summary of one story can lead to another can lead to another. Think about storytellers that you know that go off on a tangent. They never seem to finish one story without telling 100 others!

To wrap up (and to demonstrate everything I just talked about), let’s summarize this post into its most essential parts:

A summary is a great way to quickly give your audience the information they need to understand the topic you are discussing without having to know every detail.

How you write a summary is different depending on what type of summary you are doing:

• An academic summary usually gets to the heart of an article, book, or journal, and it should highlight the main points in your own words. How long it should be depends on the type of assignment it is.
• A professional summary highlights you and your professional, academic, and volunteer history. It shows people in your professional network who you are and why they should hire you, work with you, use your talents, etc.

Being able to tell a good story is another form of summary. You want to tell engaging anecdotes and facts without boring your listeners. This is a skill that is developed over time.

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Ashley Shaw

Ashley Shaw is a former editor and marketer/current PhD student and teacher. When she isn't studying con artists for her dissertation, she's thinking of new ways to help college students better understand and love the writing process. You can follow her on Twitter, or, if you prefer animal accounts, follow her rabbits, Audrey Hopbun and Fredra StaHare, on Instagram.

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How to Write a Summary of an Article: Brevity in Brilliance

Table of contents

• 1 What Is an Article Summary?
• 2 Difference Between Abstract and Research Summary Writing
• 3.1 Preparing for Summarizing
• 3.2 Identifying Main Ideas
• 3.3 Writing The Summary
• 4.1 Introduction
• 4.2 Methods
• 4.3 Results
• 4.4 Discussion
• 4.5.1 Structure Types  
• 5 Summary Writing Tips and Best Practices
• 6 Common Mistakes to Avoid
• 7 Examples of Article Summaries

Writing a review or a critique is often more difficult than it seems, so students and writers alike are often wondering about how to summarize an article. We know how challenging a task this can be, so this guide will give you a clear perspective and the main points on how to write a summary of an article.

Here’s a brief overview of the main points the article will cover before we start:

• The essence of an article summary and how to approach writing it;
• Three main steps for a successful research summary;
• Tips and strategies for outlining the main idea;
• Examples of good and bad short summaries for inspiration;
• Common mistakes to avoid when writing a research article summary.

The steps outlined in this post will help you summarize an article in your own words without sacrificing the original text message and ideas.

What Is an Article Summary?

An article summary is a concise and condensed version of a longer piece of writing, often an article, research paper, or news report. Its purpose is to capture the main ideas, crucial points, and key arguments found in the original text, providing a brief and easily understandable overview.

These summaries are composed in the author’s own words, distilling the essential information to help readers quickly grasp the content without having to read the entire article. They serve as a helpful tool to offer a snapshot of the most important aspects of the content, making it simpler for readers to decide whether they wish to delve into the complete article.

A common goal of academic summary writing is to  improve critical thinking skills , and they serve as great practice for academic writers to improve their own writing skills. There are several main goals of writing a synopsis of an article:

• This paper’s main goal is to provide a comprehensive yet brief descriptive comment on a particular article, telling your readers about the author’s topic sentence and important points in his work and the key points of it.
• It serves to outline a laconic reader’s perspective on the paper while keeping the main point.
• Identifies all the crucial segments from each of the paper’s sections.

A proper article summary can help do your college essays the right way because it provides a great, concise view of the source article. Especially if you are often facing writing tasks like academic papers, knowing how to write a good synopsis can upgrade your writing skills.

Difference Between Abstract and Research Summary Writing

Things get confusing when someone wants to define their place and purpose inside the text. To be more precise, the abstract appears first in the academic article, whereas the summary appears last.

Many students cannot distinguish between a summary and an abstract of a research paper. While these have certain similarities, they are not the same. Therefore, you must be aware of the subtleties before beginning a research article.

On the one hand, both components have a limited scope. Their goal is to provide a thorough literature assessment of the research paper’s main ideas. When you write a research summary, focus on your topic, methods, and findings.

Below you can find more differences between the abstract and research article summary for your project:

• Abstracts provide a succinct synopsis of your work and showcase your writing style.
• Abstracts lay out the background information and clarify the primary hypothesis thesis statement, while the summary emphasizes your research methodology, highlighting the important elements.

Finally, you must submit the abstract before actual publication. On the other hand, article summaries come with the finished piece of paper.

Steps to Write a Summary for an Article

In the world of effective communication, the skill of crafting short yet informative summaries is invaluable. Whether you’re a student dealing with academic articles, a professional simplifying complex reports, or simply someone looking to grasp the essence of an interesting read, mastering the art of summarization is crucial. This summarizing guidelines will lead you through the steps to write a compelling piece.

These steps will empower you to extract core ideas and key takeaways, making it easier to understand and share information efficiently.

Preparing for Summarizing

Before you start writing your summary of the article, you’ll have to read the piece a few times first as a base for further understanding. It’s recommended that you read the paper without taking any notes first because this gives you some room to create your own perspective of the work.

After the first reading, you should be able to tell the author’s perspective and the type of audience they are focusing on. Subsequently, you should get ready for the second read with a paper to write notes on as you get into the arguments of the post.

Identifying Main Ideas

As you come to the second read of the article, you should focus on the thesis statement, main ideas, and important details laid out in the piece. If you look at the headings and sections individually, you should be able to get some material for the summarizing by taking out the crucial events or a topic sentence from each part.

While writing down the main arguments of the post, make sure to ask the five “W” questions. If you think about the “Who” , “Why” , “When” , “Where” , and “What” , you should be able to construct a layout for the summary based on the main ideas.

Writing The Summary

Once you lay down the article’s main ideas and answer the key questions about it, you’ll have an outline for writing. The next move is to keep an eye out on the structure of the summary and use the material in your notes to write your short take on these essential points.

The steps for writing article summaries can be similar to the  main steps of article review writing . Therefore, it’s necessary to discuss the structure next so we can set you in the right direction with summary-specific format tips.

Outline Your Research Summary

To summarize research papers, you must be aware of the basic structure. You may know how to cite sources and filter the ideas, but you’ll also have to organize your findings in a concise academic structure.

The following components are essential for a summary paper format:

Introduction

Your research article’s introduction is a brief overview of your work. Outlining important ideas or presenting the state of the topic under research seeks to make the issue easier for your audience to comprehend.

The Methods section includes tests, databases, experiments, surveys, questionnaires, sampling, or statistical analysis, used to conduct a research study. However, for a solid research paper summary example, you should avoid getting bogged down in the specifics and just discuss the tools you utilized and how you conducted your study.

This part the summary of research, presents all of the data you gathered from your investigations and analysis. Therefore, incorporate any information you learned by watching your target and the supporting theories.

This stage requires you to summarize research paper, evaluate the result in light of the pertinent background, and determine how it reacts to the prevailing trends. You need to identify the subject’s advantages and disadvantages once you have provided an explanation using theoretical models. You may also recommend more research in the area.

Use this last part to support or refute your theories in light of the data collection and analysis, though, if your mentor insists on it being in a separate paragraph.

Here’s a research summary example outlining the topic “The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health Among Adolescents”:

I. Introduction.

• Brief overview of the rise of social media.
• Importance of studying its impact on mental health.
• Statement of the problem.
• Purpose of the study.

II. Literature Review.

• Statistics on social media penetration.
• Common platforms and their features.
• Studies supporting a negative and/or a positive impact.
• Gaps and inconsistencies in existing literature.

III. Methodology.

• Quantitative approach.
• Cross-sectional survey.
• Survey instrument details.
• Ethical considerations.

IV. Data Analysis.

• Descriptive statistics.
• Inferential statistics (e.g., regression analysis).
• Tables and figures.
• Key findings.

V. Discussion.

• Correlation between social media usage and mental health.
• Identification of patterns and trends.
• Practical implications for parents, educators, and policymakers.
• Suggestions for future research.

VI. Conclusion.

• Summary of key findings.
• Final remarks on the study’s contribution to the field.

The given research article summary example depicts how the text can be structured in a laconic and effective way.

Structure Types  

So, now you can see the best practices and structure types for writing both empirical and argumentative summaries. The only thing left to discuss is to go through our example outlined above and divide its structure into distinctive parts, which you could use when writing your own summary.

The best way to start is by mentioning the title and the author of the article. It’s best to keep it straightforward: “ In “Who Will Be In Cyberspace”, author Langdon Winner takes a philosophical approach…”

The next part is critical for writing a good summary since you’ll want to captivate the reader with a short and concise one-point thesis. If you look at our example, you’ll see that the first sentence or two contains the main point, along with the title and the author’s name.

So, that’s an easy way to get straight to the point while also sounding professional, and this works for all the essay structure types. You should briefly point out the main supportive points as well – “ He supports this through the claims that people working in the information industry should be more careful about newly developed technologies…”  

The key is to keep it neutral and not overcomplicate things with supportive claims. Try to make them as precise as possible and provide examples that directly support the main thesis.

Unless it’s a scientific article summary where you are requested to provide your take as a researcher, it’s also best to avoid using personal opinions. You can conclude the summary by once again mentioning the main thought of the article, and this time you can make the connection between the main thesis and supporting points to wrap up.

Summary Writing Tips and Best Practices

The way in which you’ll approach writing a summary depends on the type and topic of the original article, but there are some common points to keep in mind. Whether you are trying to summarize a research article or a journal piece, these tips can help you stay on topic:

• Be concise – The best way to summarize an article quickly is to be straightforward. In practice, it means making it all in a few sentences and no longer than one-fourth of the size of the original article.
• Highlight the study’s most significant findings – For your summary paper, prioritize presenting results that have the most substantial impact or contribute significantly to the field.
• Create a reverse outline – On the other hand, you can also remove the supporting writing to end up with a reverse essay outline and these are the ideas you can expand on through your summary.
• Use your own words – In most cases, a paper summary will be scanned for plagiarism, so you need to make sure you are using your words to express the main point uniquely. This doesn’t mean you have to provide your perspective on the topic. It just means your summary needs to be original.
• Make sure to follow the tone – Summarizing an article means you’ll also need to reflect on the tone of the original piece. To properly summarize an article, you should address the same tone in which the author is addressing the audience.
• Use author tags – Along with the thesis statement, you also have to express the author’s take through author tags. This means you need to state the name of the author and piece title at the beginning, and keep adding these “tags” like “he” or “she” or simply refer to the author by name when expressing their ideas.
• Avoid minor details – To ensure you stay on topic, it’s recommended that you avoid repetition, any minor details, or descriptive elements. Try to keep the focus on key points, main statements and ideas without being carried away in thought.
• Steer clear of interpretations or personal opinions – Avoid personal interpretations or opinions when you write a summary for a research paper. Remember to stick to presenting facts and findings without injecting subjective views.
• Highlight the research context – Focus on explaining to the readers why research is important. Your summary of research paper must not repeat the previous studies. Find the gap in the existing literature it could fill. When you write a summary of a research article, try to help readers understand the significance of your study within the broader academic or practical context. Use a paraphraser if you need a fresh perspective on your writing style.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Just like it’s important to  avoid plagiarism in your text , there are a few other mistakes that commonly occur. The whole point is to summarize article pieces genuinely, with a focus on the author’s argument and writing in your own words.

We’ve often seen college graduates do an article summary and misrepresent the author’s idea or take, so that’s an important piece of advice. You should avoid drifting away from the author’s main idea throughout the summary and keep it precise but not too short.

Quotes shouldn’t be used directly within the piece, and by that, we mean both quotes from the author and quotes from other summaries on the same topic since it would qualify as plagiarism. Finally, you shouldn’t state your opinion unless you are doing a summary of a novel or short story with a specific academic goal of writing from your perspective.

Examples of Article Summaries

While our guide and tips can be used for a variety of different types of written pieces, there are various types of articles. From professional essay writing to informative article synopsis, options can vary.

We will give you an example of a summary of the different article types that you may run upon, so you can see exactly what we mean by those standardized instructions and tips:

The question of how to summarize an article isn’t new to students or even writers with more experience, so we hope this guide will shed some light on the process. The most important piece of advice we can give you is to stay true to the main statement and key points of the article and express the synopsis in your original way to avoid plagiarism.

As for the structure, we are certain you’ll be able to use our examples and layouts for different types of summaries, so make sure to pay extra attention to the structure, quotes, and author tags.

What is a good way to start a summary?

To begin a summary effectively, start by briefly introducing the article’s topic and the main points the author discusses. Capture the reader’s attention with a concise yet engaging opening sentence. Provide context and mention the author’s name and the article’s title. Convey the essence of the article’s content, highlighting its significance or relevance to the reader. This initial context-setting sentence lays the foundation for a clear and engaging summary that draws the reader in.

What is the difference between summarizing and criticizing an article?

Summarizing an article entails condensing its main points objectively and neutrally, presenting the essential information to readers. In contrast, critiquing an article involves a more in-depth evaluation, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, methodology, and overall quality, often including the expression of personal opinions and judgments. Summarization offers a snapshot of the content, while critique delves deeper, offering a comprehensive assessment.

When summarizing a text, focus on these critical questions:

• “What’s the main point?” Find the core message or argument.
• “What supports the main point?” Identify key supporting details and evidence.
• “Who’s the author?” Consider their qualifications and potential bias.
• “Who’s the intended audience?” Understand the expected reader’s knowledge level.
• “Why is it important?” Explain the text’s relevance and significance within its context. Addressing these questions ensures a thorough and effective summary.

How long is a summary and how many paragraphs does a summary have?

A summary typically ranges from one to three paragraphs in length, depending on the complexity and length of the original text. The goal is to concisely present the main points or essence of the source material, usually resulting in a summary that is significantly shorter than the original.

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Best Summary Generator | Tools Tested & Reviewed

Published on May 6, 2024 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on May 21, 2024.

A summary generator (also called a summarizer , summarizing tool , or text summarizer ) is a kind of AI writing tool that automatically generates a short summary of a text. Many tools like this are available online, but what are the best options out there?

To find out, we tested 11 popular summary generators (all available free online, some with a premium version). We used two texts: a short news article and a longer academic journal article. We evaluated tools based on the clarity, accuracy, and concision of the summaries produced.

Our research indicates that the best summarizer available right now is the one offered by QuillBot . You can use it for free to summarize texts of up to 1,200 words—up to 6,000 with a premium subscription.

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Table of contents

1. quillbot , 2. resoomer , 3. scribbr , 4. sassbook , 5. paraphraser , 6. tldr this , 7. rephrase , 8. editpad , 9. summarizing tool , 10. smodin , 11. summarizer , research methodology, frequently asked questions about summarizers.

• Produces the clearest and most accurate summaries
• Summarizes text in a creative way, combining sentences
• Can summarize long texts (up to 6,000 words with premium)
• Options for length, format of summary, and keywords to focus on
• Highlights text that was used in the summary
• Summaries occasionally include errors
• Premium costs $19.95 a month (but gets you a variety of other tools)

We found QuillBot’s summarizer to be the most effective tool available right now. Its technology is more advanced and creative than any other tool’s. It offers a Key Sentences mode and a Paragraph mode; we found the Paragraph mode to be the most useful.

This mode effectively combined information from multiple sentences to produce a concise and clear summary. In the premium version, it was also able to summarize the longer testing text very effectively. The tool usefully highlights text from your input that was used in the summary, and it allows you to pick keywords to focus on if you want a summary of a specific theme.

We did notice some errors even in this tool: it occasionally misunderstood the meaning of the text or combined sentences in a way that was misleading. On one occasion, it seemed to introduce a typo (“collectiveists”) that wasn’t present in the original text.

Try QuillBot’s summarizer

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• Relatively clear and accurate summaries
• Summarizes creatively, combining sentences
• A variety of modes and options
• Can summarize long texts (no word limit as far as we could tell)
• Confusing interface with irrelevant features
• Summaries of long texts are long-winded and split across multiple pages
• Only the premium mode ($10.57 a month) is useful

We found that Resoomer, though significantly less powerful than QuillBot, was stronger than other competitors—at least, if you pay for its premium mode. Like QuillBot, it generated creative summaries that combined information from different sentences in a relatively fluent way.

It was able to summarize the long text, but the summary it produced was overly long and spread across multiple pages we had to click between, limiting its usefulness. Resoomer offers a variety of modes, but they are presented in a rather confusing way and all of the free modes are very basic, just picking out sentences from the text rather than generating an original summary.

The mode we found useful was the “Assisted” mode, which is unfortunately only available with a premium subscription. We also didn’t find a use for the unusual “More words” button, which generates a continuation of the summary, seemingly not based on anything in the text.

Try Resoomer

• Produces clear and accurate summaries (powered by QuillBot)
• Can’t summarize long texts (limit of 600 words)

Scribbr’s summarizer is powered by QuillBot technology, which means that it offers the same modes, options, and quality-of-life features such as highlighting text used in the summary. And it produces similarly creative summaries: clear, concise, and fluently written.

The Scribbr summarizer does have one key limitation compared to the QuillBot tool: it cannot handle longer texts, since it has a limit of 600 words per input. The Scribbr tool is free, with no sign-up required and no premium version available right now.

Try Scribbr’s summarizer

• Relatively fluent and creative summaries
• Can summarize long texts (up to 22,000 characters with premium)
• Provides options for length and format of summary
• Very expensive subscription ($39 a month)
• Adds unnecessary verbiage (“Authors say that …”)
• Fairly cluttered interface
• Summaries sometimes misleading or hard to follow

We found that Sassbook provided relatively creative summaries, combining information from different sentences in a similar way to QuillBot or Resoomer. But we found the results less clear than in those tools.

Especially for the longer text, we saw that Sassbook summaries were not very coherently structured, presenting information in a somewhat random order that was hard to follow. We also noticed the tool’s tendency to insert unnecessary text such as “Authors say that …”

Moreover, the tool can only handle longer texts if you pay for a premium subscription, and we found the premium subscription to be unreasonably priced at $39 a month. Perhaps if you find the other tools included in the subscription useful, it could be worth the price. For the summarizer alone, it certainly isn’t worth it, and there are much better and cheaper options out there.

Try Sassbook’s summarizer

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• Creative summaries with use of note-style language
• Summaries are usually relatively clear and accurate
• Can’t summarize long texts (no word limit stated, but didn’t work with our long text)
• Summaries are too long, and length controls make little difference
• Note-style summaries may not be what you want
• Some confusing moments in summaries

Paraphraser’s summarizer is a free tool with no premium options. It offers two modes, “Summarizer” and “AI Summarizer”; the difference isn’t clearly explained, but in our experience, AI Summarizer produced much better results. Summaries produced in this mode were creative but rough, using note-style language (e.g., omitting articles, using abbreviations) in a way we didn’t see in other tools.

Other options were available but made little difference to the output. Selecting different lengths of summary made very little difference in practice, and the alternative “Bullets” mode presented the same text as the “Paragraph” mode, but in bullet points. Because summary length couldn’t be effectively adjusted, summaries were always longer than we would have liked: over half the length of the full text.

There were also some confusing errors in the output: summaries would often end with a sentence like “Please shorten this text” that clearly shouldn’t be there. And although no word limit is mentioned, the tool didn’t work for our longer text in practice, summarizing only the first 1,000 words.

Try Paraphraser’s summarizer

• 10 free “AI” summaries to start with
• Can summarize the long text
• Just selects a few sentences from the text, producing no original summary
• Costs $4 a month for premium options (100 summaries a month)
• Premium options not noticeably better than free version
• Options (e.g., “short” or “detailed” modes) not noticeably different

The TLDR This tool seems to operate in a very basic way, just taking a few sentences from the text and presenting them in the order in which they originally appeared. It does not combine or paraphrase information in a creative way, even in its premium “AI” mode, which we found produced results nearly identical to those of the free “key sentences” mode.

Like some other tools, it can pick out keywords from the text. But the keywords selected are sometimes not very logical (e.g., “Percent Last Year”), and clicking on them just googles them rather than doing anything in the tool itself. We also did not notice any significant differences between the “short” and “detailed” modes.

Because of its very basic approach and the lack of noticeable differences between its modes, we don’t advise paying for TLDR This.

Try TLDR This

• Can’t summarize the long text (no word limit stated, but didn’t work in practice)
• No options for different lengths or formats of summary

Like TLDR This, Rephrase’s summarizer seemed to just select sentences from the text and present them in the same order again, without any creative recombination of information. In this case, the only way it modified the text was by putting the paragraph breaks at different points.

Rephrase’s tool is free, but, as mentioned, it’s extremely basic. It also lacks any options to change the length or format of the summary. As with other tools like this, the sentences it selects feel very random and often make no sense out of context, meaning the “summary” provided is effectively useless.

No word limit is indicated in the tool, but in practice we found that it could only summarize the first 1,500 words of our longer text. We also found the interface somewhat cluttered with ads.

Try Rephrase’s summarizer

• Can summarize the long text (stated limit of 10,000 words, seems to be 9,000 in reality and much lower in premium mode)
• Premium mode ($30 for a month) is indistinguishable from free mode apart from having a lower word limit and  fewer  options
• Messy interface

Editpad was one of the worst tools we tested: like Paraphraser’s tool, it offered a “Summarizer” mode (which seems identical to Paraphraser’s tool) and an “AI Summarizer” mode (only available with a $30 premium subscription in the case of Editpad).

But Editpad’s AI Summarizer mode seems worse than the free mode. The results in both modes are very basic, seemingly just selecting some sentences from the text and presenting them in the same order. The AI Summarizer mode differed in only two ways that we noticed: it could not summarize the long text (the free mode could), and it did not have any options regarding the length of the summary.

It’s not clear why Editpad charges money for a tool that seems to be much worse than the (already poor) tool they offer for free, but we strongly advise against paying for it.

Try Editpad’s summarizer

• Just selects sentences from the text and presents them in random order
• Summary of long text is very long

Summarizing Tool is a free tool that doesn’t really produce coherent summaries. Like many other tools, it just chooses some sentences from the text rather than generating an original summary. Even worse, though, it shuffles the sentences into a random order, making the text difficult to follow.

It’s not clear how this kind of “summary” could be useful, since it’s much harder to understand than if the sentences were presented in their original order.

Additionally, while the tool could summarize the long text, its summary in this case was also very long. What you get is essentially an incoherent jumble of ideas that is not even particularly short.

Try Summarizing Tool

• Can choose length of summary
• “Abstractive” and “extractive” modes not noticeably different
• Summary loads slowly
• $5 a month for premium version

Smodin’s summarizer seems to do effectively the same thing as Summarizing Tool: picking sentences from the text and presenting them out of order. In “abstractive” mode, we did notice it sometimes made slight changes to sentences, such as removing a word from the start, but it didn’t seem to properly combine information from different sentences.

One thing it did frequently do was to insert spelling errors (e.g., “religioosity”) and inappropriate synonyms (e.g., “humanity” instead of “personality”) into the text, which seems strange considering how little it otherwise changed in each sentence. In combination with the random order of the sentences, this results in a highly incoherent “summary.”

Paying $5 a month for the premium version raises the character limit from 30,000 to 50,000 and removes the daily limit of 30 entries. Given the poor quality of the tool, we don’t recommend paying.

Try Smodin’s summarizer

• Just gives you the same text back, but cut off halfway through—not a summary at all
• Unclear interface (100% length is actually the shortest)
• Not clear what the “Best Line” mode is for

Summarizer’s tool performed the worst out of those we tested. All it does is present the same text back to you, but cut off at a certain point (depending on the length of summary you select). No changes are made to any of the sentences.

Essentially, it’s a tool that deletes all but the first paragraph of a text for you. This is quite easy to do yourself with the backspace key, and it’s not likely to result in a “summary” of the text.

Try Summarizer

For our comparison, we selected 11 summarizing tools that show up prominently in search results. All the tools we tested can be used for free, but several of them have premium versions that you can use if you pay for a subscription. We tested the premium versions when available.

To compare the capabilities of the different tools, we used two testing texts, which are linked below:

• A short online news article (around 575 words)
• A longer academic journal article (around 3,500 words)

In each case, we pasted the entire main text of the article into the summarizer, leaving out things like footnotes, the article title, and details about the authors.

To judge the usefulness of the summaries generated, we looked at three qualitative factors:

• Concision:  Did the tool effectively condense the text into a quick summary?
• Clarity:  Is the summary easy to understand, or are sentences sometimes confusingly phrased or out of context?
• Accuracy:  Does it correctly express the key points of the text? Are any important details left out or stated incorrectly?

In the individual reviews, we also take into account details like user-friendliness, pricing, and limitations such as being unable to summarize the longer text.

Our research into the best summary generators (aka summarizers or summarizing tools) found that the best summarizer available is the one offered by QuillBot.

While many summarizers just pick out some sentences from the text, QuillBot generates original summaries that are creative, clear, accurate, and concise. It can summarize texts of up to 1,200 words for free, or up to 6,000 with a premium subscription.

Try the QuillBot summarizer for free

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words. Want to make your life super easy? Try our free text summarizer today!

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarize the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarize a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

All can be done within seconds with our free text summarizer .

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Caulfield, J. (2024, May 21). Best Summary Generator | Tools Tested & Reviewed. Scribbr. Retrieved September 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/ai-tools/best-summarizer/

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Summary: Using it Wisely

What this handout is about.

Knowing how to summarize something you have read, seen, or heard is a valuable skill, one you have probably used in many writing assignments. It is important, though, to recognize when you must go beyond describing, explaining, and restating texts and offer a more complex analysis. This handout will help you distinguish between summary and analysis and avoid inappropriate summary in your academic writing.

Is summary a bad thing?

Not necessarily. But it’s important that your keep your assignment and your audience in mind as you write. If your assignment requires an argument with a thesis statement and supporting evidence—as many academic writing assignments do—then you should limit the amount of summary in your paper. You might use summary to provide background, set the stage, or illustrate supporting evidence, but keep it very brief: a few sentences should do the trick. Most of your paper should focus on your argument. (Our handout on argument will help you construct a good one.)

Writing a summary of what you know about your topic before you start drafting your actual paper can sometimes be helpful. If you are unfamiliar with the material you’re analyzing, you may need to summarize what you’ve read in order to understand your reading and get your thoughts in order. Once you figure out what you know about a subject, it’s easier to decide what you want to argue.

You may also want to try some other pre-writing activities that can help you develop your own analysis. Outlining, freewriting, and mapping make it easier to get your thoughts on the page. (Check out our handout on brainstorming for some suggested techniques.)

Why is it so tempting to stick with summary and skip analysis?

Many writers rely too heavily on summary because it is what they can most easily write. If you’re stalled by a difficult writing prompt, summarizing the plot of The Great Gatsby may be more appealing than staring at the computer for three hours and wondering what to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of color symbolism. After all, the plot is usually the easiest part of a work to understand. Something similar can happen even when what you are writing about has no plot: if you don’t really understand an author’s argument, it might seem easiest to just repeat what he or she said.

To write a more analytical paper, you may need to review the text or film you are writing about, with a focus on the elements that are relevant to your thesis. If possible, carefully consider your writing assignment before reading, viewing, or listening to the material about which you’ll be writing so that your encounter with the material will be more purposeful. (We offer a handout on reading towards writing .)

How do I know if I’m summarizing?

As you read through your essay, ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I stating something that would be obvious to a reader or viewer?
• Does my essay move through the plot, history, or author’s argument in chronological order, or in the exact same order the author used?
• Am I simply describing what happens, where it happens, or whom it happens to?

A “yes” to any of these questions may be a sign that you are summarizing. If you answer yes to the questions below, though, it is a sign that your paper may have more analysis (which is usually a good thing):

• Am I making an original argument about the text?
• Have I arranged my evidence around my own points, rather than just following the author’s or plot’s order?
• Am I explaining why or how an aspect of the text is significant?

Certain phrases are warning signs of summary. Keep an eye out for these:

• “[This essay] is about…”
• “[This book] is the story of…”
• “[This author] writes about…”
• “[This movie] is set in…”

Here’s an example of an introductory paragraph containing unnecessary summary. Sentences that summarize are in italics:

The Great Gatsby is the story of a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who lives alone on an island in New York. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book, but the narrator is Nick Carraway. Nick is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he chronicles the story of Gatsby and his circle of friends, beginning with his introduction to the strange man and ending with Gatsby’s tragic death. In the story, Nick describes his environment through various colors, including green, white, and grey. Whereas white and grey symbolize false purity and decay respectively, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

Here’s how you might change the paragraph to make it a more effective introduction:

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald provides readers with detailed descriptions of the area surrounding East Egg, New York. In fact, Nick Carraway’s narration describes the setting with as much detail as the characters in the book. Nick’s description of the colors in his environment presents the book’s themes, symbolizing significant aspects of the post-World War I era. Whereas white and grey symbolize the false purity and decay of the 1920s, the color green offers a symbol of hope.

This version of the paragraph mentions the book’s title, author, setting, and narrator so that the reader is reminded of the text. And that sounds a lot like summary—but the paragraph quickly moves on to the writer’s own main topic: the setting and its relationship to the main themes of the book. The paragraph then closes with the writer’s specific thesis about the symbolism of white, grey, and green.

How do I write more analytically?

Analysis requires breaking something—like a story, poem, play, theory, or argument—into parts so you can understand how those parts work together to make the whole. Ideally, you should begin to analyze a work as you read or view it instead of waiting until after you’re done—it may help you to jot down some notes as you read. Your notes can be about major themes or ideas you notice, as well as anything that intrigues, puzzles, excites, or irritates you. Remember, analytic writing goes beyond the obvious to discuss questions of how and why—so ask yourself those questions as you read.

The St. Martin’s Handbook (the bulleted material below is quoted from p. 38 of the fifth edition) encourages readers to take the following steps in order to analyze a text:

• Identify evidence that supports or illustrates the main point or theme as well as anything that seems to contradict it.
• Consider the relationship between the words and the visuals in the work. Are they well integrated, or are they sometimes at odds with one another? What functions do the visuals serve? To capture attention? To provide more detailed information or illustration? To appeal to readers’ emotions?
• Decide whether the sources used are trustworthy.
• Identify the work’s underlying assumptions about the subject, as well as any biases it reveals.

Once you have written a draft, some questions you might want to ask yourself about your writing are “What’s my point?” or “What am I arguing in this paper?” If you can’t answer these questions, then you haven’t gone beyond summarizing. You may also want to think about how much of your writing comes from your own ideas or arguments. If you’re only reporting someone else’s ideas, you probably aren’t offering an analysis.

What strategies can help me avoid excessive summary?

• Read the assignment (the prompt) as soon as you get it. Make sure to reread it before you start writing. Go back to your assignment often while you write. (Check out our handout on reading assignments ).
• Formulate an argument (including a good thesis) and be sure that your final draft is structured around it, including aspects of the plot, story, history, background, etc. only as evidence for your argument. (You can refer to our handout on constructing thesis statements ).
• Read critically—imagine having a dialogue with the work you are discussing. What parts do you agree with? What parts do you disagree with? What questions do you have about the work? Does it remind you of other works you’ve seen?
• Make sure you have clear topic sentences that make arguments in support of your thesis statement. (Read our handout on paragraph development if you want to work on writing strong paragraphs).
• Use two different highlighters to mark your paper. With one color, highlight areas of summary or description. With the other, highlight areas of analysis. For many college papers, it’s a good idea to have lots of analysis and minimal summary/description.
• Ask yourself: What part of the essay would be obvious to a reader/viewer of the work being discussed? What parts (words, sentences, paragraphs) of the essay could be deleted without loss? In most cases, your paper should focus on points that are essential and that will be interesting to people who have already read or seen the work you are writing about.

But I’m writing a review! Don’t I have to summarize?

That depends. If you’re writing a critique of a piece of literature, a film, or a dramatic performance, you don’t necessarily need to give away much of the plot. The point is to let readers decide whether they want to enjoy it for themselves. If you do summarize, keep your summary brief and to the point.

Instead of telling your readers that the play, book, or film was “boring,” “interesting,” or “really good,” tell them specifically what parts of the work you’re talking about. It’s also important that you go beyond adjectives and explain how the work achieved its effect (how was it interesting?) and why you think the author/director wanted the audience to react a certain way. (We have a special handout on writing reviews that offers more tips.)

If you’re writing a review of an academic book or article, it may be important for you to summarize the main ideas and give an overview of the organization so your readers can decide whether it is relevant to their specific research interests.

If you are unsure how much (if any) summary a particular assignment requires, ask your instructor for guidance.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Barnet, Sylvan. 2015. A Short Guide to Writing about Art , 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Corrigan, Timothy. 2014. A Short Guide to Writing About Film , 9th ed. New York: Pearson.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Zinsser, William. 2001. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 6th ed. New York: Quill.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Jan 24, 2023

How To Write a Summary of an Article - Guide & Examples

Learn how to summarize an article, where to start, what to include, and how to keep it short and interesting through this practical guideline. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have you ever considered why article summaries yield so much attention online? 

And why it matters so much to writers?

It would be demoralizing to pour a great deal of effort and enthusiasm into an article only to have it end in a banal, trite manner.

It's like a well-made film with a vague ending.

A poor summary of an article isn't just detrimental to the piece overall, it can also leave you feeling like your precious time has been squandered.

This post will go over some guidelines on how to summarize an article, such as where to start, what to include, and how to keep it short and interesting. 

Moreover, we will offer some tried-and-true solutions that can help you speed up the summarizing process.

But before we get into that, let's figure out why we have to summarize articles in the first place.

Why Do We Need to Summarize Articles?

When you need to convey the gist of a lengthy article to someone who still needs to read it, a summary is your best bet.

It allows readers to get the brief of an article quickly without having to read it cover to cover. Your readers can easily remember and retain the main points of an article if they are correctly summarized. 

What's more, article summaries are a time-saving technique that can be used when:

✅ Writing the last part of an article .

✅ Writing a review of a book .

✅ When getting ready for a presentation in class .

✅ When conducting research for a project .

✅ When getting ready for an interview .

✅ When preparing for a test .

✅ When writing a blog post .

✅ When making a report for a customer .

✅ When writing news summaries for a website .

✅ If you are writing a speech .

Now that you know where to use it, let’s learn how to write a summary of an article in 5 simple steps. . 

You’ll be surprised when you discover that you were probably unconsciously using all these techniques already.

How To Write a Summary of an Article In 5 Steps

1. read the article.

The first step in writing a summary of an article is, of course, to read the article carefully. 

Even though this step might seem obvious, you might be surprised by how many people think a quick overview is all they need to understand a concept fully. 

That may be true, but if you want people to take your summary seriously, take the time to read the article carefully and pay attention to the main points, its details, and the structure of the tex t.

That way, you can ensure you're covering the essentials of the article, which serve as your summary's backbone.

2. Identify The Main Ideas of The Article

Let’s not beat around the bush: a quick glance at the article's outlines will reveal its central arguments .

Outlines of articles emphasize everything of utmost importance for the subject at hand.

However, if the article doesn’t have outlines, you can extract the main ideas by looking for the topic sentence in each paragraph.

3. Write Your Understanding of The Topic

The third step in writing a summary of an article is to write its main points in your own words .

The question you should ask yourself when you write an article's summary is this: 

🎯 What are the most important points that your readers should remember?

At this point, you are free to use more than just a simple statement.

Think about the big picture and focus on conveying the general impression of the argument.

Your summary argument can be more convincing by including specifics directly connected to the main idea.

4. Define Your Thesis Statement

Now that you've laid out your arguments, what do you think of your findings as a whole?

The summary boils down to your assessment.

🎯 What is the bottom line message you are trying to convey?

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for putting your ideas into words, therefore we are limited in the advice we can provide you. 

Just be yourself when you write it — your audience will enjoy the authenticity and originality that comes from your voice . 

If a reader doesn't care about what he just read, that's the worst possible reaction, right?

Thus, whether they agree or disagree, you've accomplished your goal as a writer if your audience is engaged with your content. 

5. Rewrite The Summary

Once you've completed the four steps outlined above, you have your first draft of the summary, which needs additional tweaking to make it coherent and effective.

To successfully summarize an article, you will need to rewrite it (either the entire output or just fragments of it) to strengthen your context .

You can get the most out of your sentences by using a rewriting technique that primarily focuses on shifting the working order and experimenting with synonyms.

The following are the essential components of powerful sentences:

🎯 They are clear and easy to read .

🎯 They maintain a consistent and logical line of thought .

🎯 They are engaging .

Moreover, there are two additional factors that necessitate rewriting the original article summary draft:

📍To make sure we are not repeating ourselves .

📍To avoid plagiarism .

Ok, you’re all set. Now we should test what you’ve learned from the example.

A Summary of An Article From The Example

Reading instructions is one thing, but doing what you read is entirely different. 

I'll demonstrate 4 writing strategies that can help you quickly and effectively summarize any piece of writing by applying them to the same section of the article. 

Here is the piece I’ll be using in the following text:

Additionally, you'll learn how to use AI-enabled tools to produce summary output even more quickly.

Let's start!

1. Summarizing Technique

The art of summarizing allows you to condense a lengthy piece of writing down to its essentials.

Simplifying a text means getting rid of all the fluff and focusing on the core concepts while ignoring the supporting details.

To be effective at summarizing, it's crucial that the summary maintain the same tone and point of view as the original text.

Summarizing Output Example

Tools, such as the TextCortex add-on , can help you quickly and effortlessly summarize large portions of text.

Just highlight your text , and from the rewriting menu that appears at the bottom, hit the “ Summarize ” button.

You can use TextCortex within 30+ online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Hemingway, Notion etc.

This means you don’t have to switch between the tabs to tweak your text — leverage AI writing assistance within your chosen platform's textbox.

2. Rewriting Technique

The rewriting method allows you to alter a sentence's form without changing its meaning. 

You can rewrite sentences to make them more understandable, shorter, or engaging. 

Rewriting techniques can also make your sentence sound more interesting or sophisticated by switching out a few words for synonyms..

Rewriting Output Example

The TextCortex add-on, also offers the “ Rewriting ” feature in its arsenal.

Again, highlight the sentences or paragraphs in bulk, and choose the option from the rewriting menu.

From this point, you can either copy and paste the output, or click on it to apply changes.

If you are not satisfied with the quality of your output, just click on “ Load more ” to get additional suggestions.

3. Changing the Tone of Voice Technique

One way to change the narrative and style of your writing is by adjusting the tone of voice .

This writing technique requires a writer to experiment with various sentence structures.

In other words, changing the writer's tone of voice allows you to set the mood and evoke a certain reaction from the audience.

Encouraging Tone of Voice Output Example

You guessed it right. 

The TextCortex add-on also provides you with the “ Tone ” feature that enables you to switch between different narrative styles such as “encouraging”, “casual”, “decisive”, and so on.

You can access this feature either from the rewriting menu or by hitting the purple bubble that prompts the creator suite with 60+ AI templates to choose from.

4. Proofreading

The final version of your summary must endure at least one additional writing technique: proofreading . 

You can use it to find and fix typos and other mistakes in grammar, punctuation, spelling, style, and capitalization.

A proofreading technique ensures a clear, concise, and accurate summary as a result.

The " Text-to-speech " feature is a great way to check your work for errors when using the TextCortex add-on. 

There aren't enough ways to describe how tedious it is to spot your own mistakes in writing. With this feature, you can have AI read your content aloud, allowing you to gauge its overall impact and spot errors with greater precision. 

The " Text-to-speech " function can be activated by selecting the text you wish be read aloud and then selecting the appropriate option from the rewriting menu. 

After a short wait, the " play " button will become available, and you can press it to hear the final version of your content.

What Is The Easiest Way To Summarize An Article?

Congratulations! You have successfully completed a brief course on how to write a summary of an article.

As for the question on what is the easiest way to summarize an article, my answer is clear — utilize AI writing tools to do that for you.

There comes a point in every creative person's life when inspiration dries up, and a deadline looms without mercy.

A smart move to get the ball rolling again and avoid the torture of writer's block is to invest in software that can cut down on your writing time while providing a significant breakthrough in your writing.

With the TextCortex add-on , you can accomplish all that and even more:

👍Rewrite original sentences without changing the meaning.

👍Expand the sentences to add more details in your paragraphs.

👍Summarize the original text for a brief output.

👍 Change the tone of voice to play with different narratives.

👍 Autocomplete your sentences from random thoughts.

👍 Generate long-form posts from a 5-word concept.

👍 Transform bullets into emails .

The TextCortex tool is easily accessible, enabling you to use its features on more than 30 widely used platforms.

Furthermore, its 60+ AI templates will help you write various content forms like a pro.

Interested in boosting your writing skills for free?

Get your TextCortex free account today to claim your 10 free daily creations and explore a different side of AI-writing power.

What are The 3 Elements of The Summary?

1. Introduction — A quick overview of the article's main points.

2. Body — A detailed description of the main ideas (including evidence and arguments). 

3. Conclusion — An overall evaluation of the provided solutions.

How Many Paragraphs Are In The Summary?

How many paragraphs an article summary has will depend on how long the article is and what the purpose of the summary is. 

In general, a summary will have between 1 and 4 paragraphs . 

However, if the article is very long, it may need more than 4 paragraphs.

Keep Learning

6 Effective Tricks To Rewrite Content And Improve Its Quality

Paraphrasing Vs. Summarizing: The Difference And Best Examples

6 Techniques To Change Tone In Writing Easily

Interested in adopting AI across your organization?

Teams using TextCortex save 3 work days a month per employee and achieve up to 28x ROI.

Did you like this article? Explore a few more related posts.

How To Use AI For Knowledge Management

How To Write An Email To A Recruiter [+Templates]

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Questions  answers..

TextCortex is a powerful AI-powered writing tool that can help you reduce your writing time, handle big tasks, and create high-quality content without errors. With its customizable platform, personalized intelligence experience, advanced writing and research capabilities, and error-free content, TextCortex is the perfect tool for creative professionals who want to be a creative force in their industry.

Our AI copilot learned how to write from more than 3 billion sentences and has the ability to create unique content. However, fact-checking is something which still requires a human approval.

TextCortex supports more than 25 languages including English, Dutch, German, Ukranian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian.

Yes, TextCortex is completely free to use with all of its features. When you sign up, you receive 100 free creations. Then you will receive 20 recurring creations every day on the free plan.

Yes, we have a Text Generation API, please talk to us directly to implement it. You can reach out to us at [email protected]

Account sharing is not allowed. If you have a need for more than 5 seats for an account, you can directly contact us at [email protected]

Yes, TextCortex offers 14-day free trial for users to try out all features extensively with higher number of generations. But keep in mind that you can already try everything with the free plan. There is no feature that is locked behind a premium plan.

Overall, TextCortex AI has over 1000 five-star reviews on reputable review sites such as G2, Trustpilot and Capterra.

TextCortex learns and adapts to your unique writing style and knowledge, making it easier for you to write high-quality & personalized content.

Your premium features will be available until the end of your subscription date, then your account plan will be set to Free plan.

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Identify the important ideas and facts

To help you summarize and analyze your argumentative texts , your articles, your scientific texts, your history texts as well as your well-structured analyses work of art, Resoomer provides you with a "Summary text tool" : an educational tool that identifies and summarizes the important ideas and facts of your documents. Summarize in 1-Click, go to the main idea or skim through so that you can then interpret your texts quickly and develop your syntheses .

Who is Resoomer for ?

College students.

With Resoomer, summarize your Wikipedia pages in a matter of seconds for your productivity.

Identify the most important ideas and arguments of your texts so that you can prepare your lessons.

JOURNALISTS

If you prefer simplified information that summarizes the major events, then Resoomer is for you !

Identify and understand very fast the facts and the ideas of your texts that are part of the current news and events.

PRESS RELEASES

With the help of Resoomer, go to the main idea of your articles to write your arguments and critiques .

Save time, summarize your digital documents for a relevant and fast uptake of information.

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Too many documents ? Simplify your readings with Resoomer like a desktop tool.

Need to summarize your chapters ? With Resoomer, go to the heart of your ideas.

Identify your books' or your authors' ideas quickly. Summarize the most important main points.

From now on, create quick summaries of your artists' presentation and their artworks .

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Surf online and save time when reading on internet ! Resoomer summarizes your articles in 500 words so that you can go to the main idea of your text.

HOW DOES RESOOMER WORK ?

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• How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples

Published on 25 September 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 12 May 2023.

Summarising , or writing a summary, means giving a concise overview of a text’s main points in your own words. A summary is always much shorter than the original text.

There are five key steps that can help you to write a summary:

• Read the text
• Break it down into sections
• Identify the key points in each section
• Write the summary
• Check the summary against the article

Writing a summary does not involve critiquing or analysing the source. You should simply provide an accurate account of the most important information and ideas (without copying any text from the original).

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Table of contents

When to write a summary, step 1: read the text, step 2: break the text down into sections, step 3: identify the key points in each section, step 4: write the summary, step 5: check the summary against the article, frequently asked questions.

There are many situations in which you might have to summarise an article or other source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to show you’ve understood the material
• To keep notes that will help you remember what you’ve read
• To give an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review

When you’re writing an academic text like an essay , research paper , or dissertation , you’ll integrate sources in a variety of ways. You might use a brief quote to support your point, or paraphrase a few sentences or paragraphs.

But it’s often appropriate to summarize a whole article or chapter if it is especially relevant to your own research, or to provide an overview of a source before you analyse or critique it.

In any case, the goal of summarising is to give your reader a clear understanding of the original source. Follow the five steps outlined below to write a good summary.

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You should read the article more than once to make sure you’ve thoroughly understood it. It’s often effective to read in three stages:

• Scan the article quickly to get a sense of its topic and overall shape.
• Read the article carefully, highlighting important points and taking notes as you read.
• Skim the article again to confirm you’ve understood the key points, and reread any particularly important or difficult passages.

There are some tricks you can use to identify the key points as you read:

• Start by reading the abstract . This already contains the author’s own summary of their work, and it tells you what to expect from the article.
• Pay attention to headings and subheadings . These should give you a good sense of what each part is about.
• Read the introduction and the conclusion together and compare them: What did the author set out to do, and what was the outcome?

To make the text more manageable and understand its sub-points, break it down into smaller sections.

If the text is a scientific paper that follows a standard empirical structure, it is probably already organised into clearly marked sections, usually including an introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

Other types of articles may not be explicitly divided into sections. But most articles and essays will be structured around a series of sub-points or themes.

Now it’s time go through each section and pick out its most important points. What does your reader need to know to understand the overall argument or conclusion of the article?

Keep in mind that a summary does not involve paraphrasing every single paragraph of the article. Your goal is to extract the essential points, leaving out anything that can be considered background information or supplementary detail.

In a scientific article, there are some easy questions you can ask to identify the key points in each part.

If the article takes a different form, you might have to think more carefully about what points are most important for the reader to understand its argument.

In that case, pay particular attention to the thesis statement —the central claim that the author wants us to accept, which usually appears in the introduction—and the topic sentences that signal the main idea of each paragraph.

Now that you know the key points that the article aims to communicate, you need to put them in your own words.

To avoid plagiarism and show you’ve understood the article, it’s essential to properly paraphrase the author’s ideas. Do not copy and paste parts of the article, not even just a sentence or two.

The best way to do this is to put the article aside and write out your own understanding of the author’s key points.

Examples of article summaries

Let’s take a look at an example. Below, we summarise this article , which scientifically investigates the old saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

An article summary like the above would be appropriate for a stand-alone summary assignment. However, you’ll often want to give an even more concise summary of an article.

For example, in a literature review or research paper, you may want to briefly summarize this study as part of a wider discussion of various sources. In this case, we can boil our summary down even further to include only the most relevant information.

Citing the source you’re summarizing

When including a summary as part of a larger text, it’s essential to properly cite the source you’re summarizing. The exact format depends on your citation style , but it usually includes an in-text citation and a full reference at the end of your paper.

You can easily create your citations and references in APA or MLA using our free citation generators.

APA Citation Generator MLA Citation Generator

Finally, read through the article once more to ensure that:

• You’ve accurately represented the author’s work
• You haven’t missed any essential information
• The phrasing is not too similar to any sentences in the original.

If you’re summarising many articles as part of your own work, it may be a good idea to use a plagiarism checker to double-check that your text is completely original and properly cited. Just be sure to use one that’s safe and reliable.

A summary is a short overview of the main points of an article or other source, written entirely in your own words.

Save yourself some time with the free summariser.

A summary is always much shorter than the original text. The length of a summary can range from just a few sentences to several paragraphs; it depends on the length of the article you’re summarising, and on the purpose of the summary.

With the summariser tool you can easily adjust the length of your summary.

You might have to write a summary of a source:

• As a stand-alone assignment to prove you understand the material
• For your own use, to keep notes on your reading
• To provide an overview of other researchers’ work in a literature review
• In a paper , to summarise or introduce a relevant study

To avoid plagiarism when summarising an article or other source, follow these two rules:

• Write the summary entirely in your own words by   paraphrasing the author’s ideas.
• Reference the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.

An abstract concisely explains all the key points of an academic text such as a thesis , dissertation or journal article. It should summarise the whole text, not just introduce it.

An abstract is a type of summary , but summaries are also written elsewhere in academic writing . For example, you might summarise a source in a paper , in a literature review , or as a standalone assignment.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, May 12). How to Write a Summary | Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 9 September 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/working-sources/how-to-write-a-summary/

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NPR fact-checked the Harris-Trump presidential debate. Here's what we found

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak during a presidential debate. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump faced off Tuesday in their first — and possibly only — debate of the 2024 campaign, taking questions on key issues like the border, the economy and abortion.

With the candidates virtually tied in the polls, and just 55 days until Election Day, Trump and Harris sought to define their visions for America in front of a national audience and deflect attacks from the other side.

NPR reporters fact-checked the candidates' claims in real time . Here's what they found:

TRUMP: "I had no inflation, virtually no inflation. They had the highest inflation, perhaps in the history of our country, because I've never seen a worse period of time. People can't go out and buy cereal or bacon or eggs or anything else."

Inflation soared to a four-decade high of 9.1% in 2022, according to the consumer price index. While inflation has since fallen to 2.9% (as of July), prices — particularly food prices — are still higher than many Americans would like.

Other countries have also faced high inflation in the wake of the pandemic, as tangled supply chains struggled to keep pace with surging demand. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also fueled inflation by driving up energy and food prices worldwide.

Government spending in the U.S. under both the Biden-Harris administration and Trump also may have contributed, putting more money in people’s pockets and enabling them to keep spending in the face of high prices.

While high prices are a source of frustration for many Americans, the average worker has more buying power today than she did before the pandemic. Since February 2020 (just before the pandemic took hold in the U.S.), consumer prices have risen 21.6% while average wages have risen 23%.

Many prices were depressed early in the pandemic, however, so the comparison is less flattering if you start the clock when President Biden and Vice President Harris took office. Since early 2021, consumer prices have risen 19.6%, while average wages have risen 16.9%. Wage gains have been outpacing price increases for over a year, so that gap should eventually close.

— NPR economics correspondent Scott Horsley

2024 Election

Taylor swift endorses kamala harris in instagram post after the debate.

HARRIS: "Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression."

At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the national unemployment rate was near 25%, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, the unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April 2020, a level not seen since 1948, according to the Congressional Research Service.

But by the time Trump left office, unemployment had fallen to a lower, but still elevated, level. The January 2021 unemployment rate was 6.3%.

— NPR producer Lexie Schapitl

Immigration

TRUMP: "You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio, you look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country, and they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out."

Trump attacked Harris and Biden's records on immigration, arguing that they're failing to stem people from other countries from entering the U.S. and causing violence.

In the last two years, more than 40,000 Venezuelan immigrants have arrived in the Denver metro area. And it is true that many now live in Aurora.

A few weeks ago, a video of gang members in an Aurora, Colo., apartment building had right-wing media declaring the city's takeover by Venezuelan gangs. NPR looked into these claims .

Indian migrants drive surge in northern U.S. border crossings

Shortly after the video appeared, Colorado's Republican Party sent a fundraising letter claiming the state is under violent attack, and Venezuelan gangs have taken over Aurora.

It's also true Aurora police have recently arrested 10 members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. But Aurora's interim police chief, Heather Morris, says there's no evidence of a gang takeover of apartment buildings in her city.

What's more, violent crime — including murder, robbery and rape — is way down nationwide, according to the most recent data from the FBI . Notably, analysts predict violent crime rates this year will fall back down to where they were before they surged during the pandemic and may even approach a 50-year low.

Trump also claims that migrants are driving up crime rates in the U.S. That is not true. Researchers from Stanford University found that since the 1960s, immigrants have been 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found undocumented immigrants in Texas were 37% less likely to be convicted of a crime.

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd and criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson

TRUMP: "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

This remark refers to a debunked, dehumanizing claim that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting pets and eating them .

Untangling Disinformation

Jd vance spreads debunked claims about haitian immigrants eating pets.

The claim, which local police say is baseless, first circulated among far-right activists, local Republicans and neo-Nazis before being picked up by congressional leaders, vice presidential candidate JD Vance and others. A well-known advocate for the Haitian community says she received a wave of racist harassment after Vance shared the theory on social media.

The Springfield News-Sun reported that local police said that incidents of pets being stolen or eaten were "not something that's on our radar right now." The paper said the unsubstantiated claim seems to have started with a post in a Springfield Facebook group that was widely shared across social media.

The claim is the latest example of Trump leaning into anti-immigrant rhetoric. Since entering the political arena in 2015, Trump accused immigrants of being criminals, rapists, or "poisoning the blood of our nation."

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd

TRUMP: "A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, [Democrats] are trying to get them to vote."

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no credible evidence that it has happened in significant numbers, or that there is an effort underway to illegally register undocumented immigrants to vote this election.

Voter registration forms require voters to sign an oath — under penalty of perjury — that they are U.S. citizens. If a noncitizen lies about their citizenship on a registration form and votes, they have created a paper trail of a crime that is punishable with jail time and deportation.

“The deterrent is incredibly strong,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told NPR.

Illegal crossings hit Biden-era low as migrants wait longer for entry

Election officials routinely verify information on voter registration forms, which ask registrants for either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, or 0.0001%.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger launched an audit in 2022 that found fewer than 1,700 suspected noncitizens had attempted to register to vote over the past 25 years. None were able to vote.

— NPR disinformation reporter Jude Joffe-Block

TRUMP: "[Harris] was the border czar. Remember that she was the border czar."

Republicans have taken to calling Harris the "border czar" as a way to blame her for increased migration to the U.S. and what they see as border security policy failures of the Biden administration.

There is no actual "border czar" position. In 2021, President Biden tasked Harris with addressing the root causes of migration from Central America.

As Republicans attack Harris on immigration, here’s what her California record reveals

The "root causes strategy ... identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region," the White House said in a statement. "It integrates various U.S. government tools, including diplomacy, foreign assistance, public diplomacy, and sanctions."

While Harris has been scrutinized on the right, immigration advocates have also criticized Harris, including for comments in 2021 where she warned prospective migrants, "Do not come."

TRUMP: "You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth."

As ABC News anchor Linsey Davis mentioned during her real-time fact check, there is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after birth (Trump called it "execution"). A report from KFF earlier this year also noted that abortions “after birth” are illegal in every state.

According to the Pew Research Center, the overwhelming majority of abortions — 93% — take place during the first trimester. Pew says 1% take place after 21 weeks. Most of those take place before 24 weeks, the approximate timeline for fetal viability, according to a report by KFF Health News.

Trump repeats the false claim that Democrats support abortion 'after birth' in debate

A separate analysis from KFF earlier this year noted that later abortions are expensive to obtain and offered by relatively few providers, and often occur because of medical complications or because patients face barriers earlier in their pregnancies.

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That isn’t happening; it’s insulting to the women of America,” Harris said.

Harris also invoked religion in her response, arguing that “one does not have to abandon their faith” to agree that the government should not control reproductive health decisions.

As Davis also noted, Trump has offered mixed messages about abortion over the course of the campaign. He has bragged about his instrumental role in overturning Roe v. Wade , while appearing to backpedal on an issue that polling makes clear is a liability for Republicans.

— NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon

Afghanistan

TRUMP: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan "was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen."

Trump and Republicans in Congress say President Biden is to blame for the fall of Kabul to the Taliban three years ago, and the chaotic rush at the airport where 13 U.S. troops died in a suicide bomb attack that killed nearly 200 Afghan civilians trying to flee. Of late, Republicans have been emphasizing Harris’ role . But the Afghanistan war spanned four U.S. presidencies , and it's important to note that it was the Trump administration that signed a peace deal that was basically a quick exit plan.

Trump regularly claims there were no casualties in Afghanistan for 18 months under his administration, and it’s not true, according to Pentagon records.

— NPR veterans correspondent Quil Lawrence

Military policy

HARRIS: “There is not one member of the military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.”

This is a common administration talking point, and it's technically true. But thousands of troops in Iraq and on the Syrian border are still in very dangerous terrain. U.S. troops died in Jordan in January on a base that keeps watch over the war with ISIS in Syria.

HARRIS: "I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases for fracking."

When she first ran for president in 2019, Harris had said she was firmly in favor of banning fracking — a stance she later abandoned when she joined President Biden’s campaign as his running mate.

In an interview with CNN last month, Harris attempted to explain why her position has changed from being against fracking to being in favor of it.

“What I have seen is that we can grow, and we can increase a clean energy economy without banning fracking,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash.

Harris says she won't ban fracking. What to know about the controversial topic

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. produced a record amount of oil last year — averaging 12.9 million barrels per day. That eclipsed the previous record of 12.3 million barrels per day, set under Trump in 2019. 2023 was also a record year for domestic production of natural gas . Much of the domestic boom in oil and gas production is the result of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” techniques .

In addition to record oil and gas production, the Biden-Harris administration has also coincided with rapid growth of solar and wind power . Meanwhile, coal has declined as a source of electricity.

Health care

TRUMP: "I had a choice to make: Do I save [the Affordable Care Act] and make it as good as it can be, or do I let it rot? And I saved it."

During his presidency, Trump undermined the Affordable Care Act in many ways — for instance, by slashing funding for advertising and free "navigators" who help people sign up for a health insurance plan on HealthCare.gov. And rather than deciding to "save" the ACA, he tried hard to get Congress to repeal it, and failed. When pushed Tuesday on what health policy he would put in its place, he said he has "concepts of a plan."

Shots - Health News

Amid medicaid's 'unwinding,' many states work to expand health care access.

The Biden administration has reversed course from Trump's management of the Affordable Care Act. Increased subsidies have made premiums more affordable in the marketplaces, and enrollment has surged. The uninsurance rate has dropped to its lowest point ever during the Biden administration.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 and is entrenched in the health care system. Republicans successfully ran against Obamacare for about a decade, but it has faded as a campaign issue this year.

— NPR health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin

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Peer Reviewed

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation

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Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing. The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern.

Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden

Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden

Division of Environmental Communication, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Research Questions

• Where are questionable publications produced with generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that can be found via Google Scholar published or deposited?
• What are the main characteristics of these publications in relation to predominant subject categories?
• How are these publications spread in the research infrastructure for scholarly communication?
• How is the role of the scholarly communication infrastructure challenged in maintaining public trust in science and evidence through inappropriate use of generative AI?

research note Summary

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.
• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

Implications

The use of ChatGPT to generate text for academic papers has raised concerns about research integrity. Discussion of this phenomenon is ongoing in editorials, commentaries, opinion pieces, and on social media (Bom, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2024; Thorp, 2023). There are now several lists of papers suspected of GPT misuse, and new papers are constantly being added. 1 See for example Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . While many legitimate uses of GPT for research and academic writing exist (Huang & Tan, 2023; Kitamura, 2023; Lund et al., 2023), its undeclared use—beyond proofreading—has potentially far-reaching implications for both science and society, but especially for their relationship. It, therefore, seems important to extend the discussion to one of the most accessible and well-known intermediaries between science, but also certain types of misinformation, and the public, namely Google Scholar, also in response to the legitimate concerns that the discussion of generative AI and misinformation needs to be more nuanced and empirically substantiated  (Simon et al., 2023).

Google Scholar, https://scholar.google.com , is an easy-to-use academic search engine. It is available for free, and its index is extensive (Gusenbauer & Haddaway, 2020). It is also often touted as a credible source for academic literature and even recommended in library guides, by media and information literacy initiatives, and fact checkers (Tripodi et al., 2023). However, Google Scholar lacks the transparency and adherence to standards that usually characterize citation databases. Instead, Google Scholar uses automated crawlers, like Google’s web search engine (Martín-Martín et al., 2021), and the inclusion criteria are based on primarily technical standards, allowing any individual author—with or without scientific affiliation—to upload papers to be indexed (Google Scholar Help, n.d.). It has been shown that Google Scholar is susceptible to manipulation through citation exploits (Antkare, 2020) and by providing access to fake scientific papers (Dadkhah et al., 2017). A large part of Google Scholar’s index consists of publications from established scientific journals or other forms of quality-controlled, scholarly literature. However, the index also contains a large amount of gray literature, including student papers, working papers, reports, preprint servers, and academic networking sites, as well as material from so-called “questionable” academic journals, including paper mills. The search interface does not offer the possibility to filter the results meaningfully by material type, publication status, or form of quality control, such as limiting the search to peer-reviewed material.

To understand the occurrence of ChatGPT (co-)authored work in Google Scholar’s index, we scraped it for publications, including one of two common ChatGPT responses (see Appendix A) that we encountered on social media and in media reports (DeGeurin, 2024). The results of our descriptive statistical analyses showed that around 62% did not declare the use of GPTs. Most of these GPT-fabricated papers were found in non-indexed journals and working papers, but some cases included research published in mainstream scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2 Indexed journals mean scholarly journals indexed by abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science, where the indexation implies journals with high scientific quality. Non-indexed journals are journals that fall outside of this indexation. More than half (57%) of these GPT-fabricated papers concerned policy-relevant subject areas susceptible to influence operations. To avoid increasing the visibility of these publications, we abstained from referencing them in this research note. However, we have made the data available in the Harvard Dataverse repository.

The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers. In several cases, the papers had titles that strung together general keywords and buzzwords, thus alluding to very broad and current research. These terms included “biology,” “telehealth,” “climate policy,” “diversity,” and “disrupting,” to name just a few.  While the study’s scope and design did not include a detailed analysis of which parts of the articles included fabricated text, our dataset did contain the surrounding sentences for each occurrence of the suspicious phrases that formed the basis for our search and subsequent selection. Based on that, we can say that the phrases occurred in most sections typically found in scientific publications, including the literature review, methods, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, background, motivation or societal relevance, and even discussion. This was confirmed during the joint coding, where we read and discussed all articles. It became clear that not just the text related to the telltale phrases was created by GPT, but that almost all articles in our sample of questionable articles likely contained traces of GPT-fabricated text everywhere.

Evidence hacking and backfiring effects

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) can be used to produce texts that mimic scientific writing. These texts, when made available online—as we demonstrate—leak into the databases of academic search engines and other parts of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication. This development exacerbates problems that were already present with less sophisticated text generators (Antkare, 2020; Cabanac & Labbé, 2021). Yet, the public release of ChatGPT in 2022, together with the way Google Scholar works, has increased the likelihood of lay people (e.g., media, politicians, patients, students) coming across questionable (or even entirely GPT-fabricated) papers and other problematic research findings. Previous research has emphasized that the ability to determine the value and status of scientific publications for lay people is at stake when misleading articles are passed off as reputable (Haider & Åström, 2017) and that systematic literature reviews risk being compromised (Dadkhah et al., 2017). It has also been highlighted that Google Scholar, in particular, can be and has been exploited for manipulating the evidence base for politically charged issues and to fuel conspiracy narratives (Tripodi et al., 2023). Both concerns are likely to be magnified in the future, increasing the risk of what we suggest calling evidence hacking —the strategic and coordinated malicious manipulation of society’s evidence base.

The authority of quality-controlled research as evidence to support legislation, policy, politics, and other forms of decision-making is undermined by the presence of undeclared GPT-fabricated content in publications professing to be scientific. Due to the large number of archives, repositories, mirror sites, and shadow libraries to which they spread, there is a clear risk that GPT-fabricated, questionable papers will reach audiences even after a possible retraction. There are considerable technical difficulties involved in identifying and tracing computer-fabricated papers (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021; Dadkhah et al., 2023; Jones, 2024), not to mention preventing and curbing their spread and uptake.

However, as the rise of the so-called anti-vaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing obstruction and denial of climate change show, retracting erroneous publications often fuels conspiracies and increases the following of these movements rather than stopping them. To illustrate this mechanism, climate deniers frequently question established scientific consensus by pointing to other, supposedly scientific, studies that support their claims. Usually, these are poorly executed, not peer-reviewed, based on obsolete data, or even fraudulent (Dunlap & Brulle, 2020). A similar strategy is successful in the alternative epistemic world of the global anti-vaccination movement (Carrion, 2018) and the persistence of flawed and questionable publications in the scientific record already poses significant problems for health research, policy, and lawmakers, and thus for society as a whole (Littell et al., 2024). Considering that a person’s support for “doing your own research” is associated with increased mistrust in scientific institutions (Chinn & Hasell, 2023), it will be of utmost importance to anticipate and consider such backfiring effects already when designing a technical solution, when suggesting industry or legal regulation, and in the planning of educational measures.

Recommendations

Solutions should be based on simultaneous considerations of technical, educational, and regulatory approaches, as well as incentives, including social ones, across the entire research infrastructure. Paying attention to how these approaches and incentives relate to each other can help identify points and mechanisms for disruption. Recognizing fraudulent academic papers must happen alongside understanding how they reach their audiences and what reasons there might be for some of these papers successfully “sticking around.” A possible way to mitigate some of the risks associated with GPT-fabricated scholarly texts finding their way into academic search engine results would be to provide filtering options for facets such as indexed journals, gray literature, peer-review, and similar on the interface of publicly available academic search engines. Furthermore, evaluation tools for indexed journals 3 Such as LiU Journal CheckUp, https://ep.liu.se/JournalCheckup/default.aspx?lang=eng . could be integrated into the graphical user interfaces and the crawlers of these academic search engines. To enable accountability, it is important that the index (database) of such a search engine is populated according to criteria that are transparent, open to scrutiny, and appropriate to the workings of  science and other forms of academic research. Moreover, considering that Google Scholar has no real competitor, there is a strong case for establishing a freely accessible, non-specialized academic search engine that is not run for commercial reasons but for reasons of public interest. Such measures, together with educational initiatives aimed particularly at policymakers, science communicators, journalists, and other media workers, will be crucial to reducing the possibilities for and effects of malicious manipulation or evidence hacking. It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded. These range from a largely dysfunctional scholarly publishing system (Haider & Åström, 2017) and academia’s “publish or perish” paradigm to Google’s near-monopoly and ideological battles over the control of information and ultimately knowledge. Any intervention is likely to have systemic effects; these effects need to be considered and assessed in advance and, ideally, followed up on.

Our study focused on a selection of papers that were easily recognizable as fraudulent. We used this relatively small sample as a magnifying glass to examine, delineate, and understand a problem that goes beyond the scope of the sample itself, which however points towards larger concerns that require further investigation. The work of ongoing whistleblowing initiatives 4 Such as Academ-AI, https://www.academ-ai.info/ , and Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/ . , recent media reports of journal closures (Subbaraman, 2024), or GPT-related changes in word use and writing style (Cabanac et al., 2021; Stokel-Walker, 2024) suggest that we only see the tip of the iceberg. There are already more sophisticated cases (Dadkhah et al., 2023) as well as cases involving fabricated images (Gu et al., 2022). Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon. Our findings underline that the risk of fake scientific papers being used to maliciously manipulate evidence (see Dadkhah et al., 2017) must be taken seriously. Manipulation may involve undeclared automatic summaries of texts, inclusion in literature reviews, explicit scientific claims, or the concealment of errors in studies so that they are difficult to detect in peer review. However, the mere possibility of these things happening is a significant risk in its own right that can be strategically exploited and will have ramifications for trust in and perception of science. Society’s methods of evaluating sources and the foundations of media and information literacy are under threat and public trust in science is at risk of further erosion, with far-reaching consequences for society in dealing with information disorders. To address this multifaceted problem, we first need to understand why it exists and proliferates.

Finding 1: 139 GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page. Non-indexed journals dominate.

Most questionable papers we found were in non-indexed journals or were working papers, but we did also find some in established journals, publications, conferences, and repositories. We found a total of 139 papers with a suspected deceptive use of ChatGPT or similar LLM applications (see Table 1). Out of these, 19 were in indexed journals, 89 were in non-indexed journals, 19 were student papers found in university databases, and 12 were working papers (mostly in preprint databases). Table 1 divides these papers into categories. Health and environment papers made up around 34% (47) of the sample. Of these, 66% were present in non-indexed journals.

Finding 2: GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies. Applied topics with practical implications dominate.

The 20 papers concerning health-related issues are distributed across 20 unique domains, accounting for 46 URLs. The 27 papers dealing with environmental issues can be found across 26 unique domains, accounting for 56 URLs.  Most of the identified papers exist in multiple copies and have already spread to several archives, repositories, and social media. It would be difficult, or impossible, to remove them from the scientific record.

As apparent from Table 2, GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are seeping into most parts of the online research infrastructure for scholarly communication. Platforms on which identified papers have appeared include ResearchGate, ORCiD, Journal of Population Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology (JPTCP), Easychair, Frontiers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE), and X/Twitter. Thus, even if they are retracted from their original source, it will prove very difficult to track, remove, or even just mark them up on other platforms. Moreover, unless regulated, Google Scholar will enable their continued and most likely unlabeled discoverability.

A word rain visualization (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023), which combines word prominences through TF-IDF 5 Term frequency–inverse document frequency , a method for measuring the significance of a word in a document compared to its frequency across all documents in a collection. scores with semantic similarity of the full texts of our sample of GPT-generated articles that fall into the “Environment” and “Health” categories, reflects the two categories in question. However, as can be seen in Figure 1, it also reveals overlap and sub-areas. The y-axis shows word prominences through word positions and font sizes, while the x-axis indicates semantic similarity. In addition to a certain amount of overlap, this reveals sub-areas, which are best described as two distinct events within the word rain. The event on the left bundles terms related to the development and management of health and healthcare with “challenges,” “impact,” and “potential of artificial intelligence”emerging as semantically related terms. Terms related to research infrastructures, environmental, epistemic, and technological concepts are arranged further down in the same event (e.g., “system,” “climate,” “understanding,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” “sustainable”). A second distinct event further to the right bundles terms associated with fish farming and aquatic medicinal plants, highlighting the presence of an aquaculture cluster.  Here, the prominence of groups of terms such as “used,” “model,” “-based,” and “traditional” suggests the presence of applied research on these topics. The two events making up the word rain visualization, are linked by a less dominant but overlapping cluster of terms related to “energy” and “water.”

The bar chart of the terms in the paper subset (see Figure 2) complements the word rain visualization by depicting the most prominent terms in the full texts along the y-axis. Here, word prominences across health and environment papers are arranged descendingly, where values outside parentheses are TF-IDF values (relative frequencies) and values inside parentheses are raw term frequencies (absolute frequencies).

Finding 3: Google Scholar presents results from quality-controlled and non-controlled citation databases on the same interface, providing unfiltered access to GPT-fabricated questionable papers.

Google Scholar’s central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking (Tripodi et al., 2023) and will have implications for any attempts to retract or remove fraudulent papers from their original publication venues. Any solution must consider the entirety of the research infrastructure for scholarly communication and the interplay of different actors, interests, and incentives.

We searched and scraped Google Scholar using the Python library Scholarly (Cholewiak et al., 2023) for papers that included specific phrases known to be common responses from ChatGPT and similar applications with the same underlying model (GPT3.5 or GPT4): “as of my last knowledge update” and/or “I don’t have access to real-time data” (see Appendix A). This facilitated the identification of papers that likely used generative AI to produce text, resulting in 227 retrieved papers. The papers’ bibliographic information was automatically added to a spreadsheet and downloaded into Zotero. 6 An open-source reference manager, https://zotero.org .

We employed multiple coding (Barbour, 2001) to classify the papers based on their content. First, we jointly assessed whether the paper was suspected of fraudulent use of ChatGPT (or similar) based on how the text was integrated into the papers and whether the paper was presented as original research output or the AI tool’s role was acknowledged. Second, in analyzing the content of the papers, we continued the multiple coding by classifying the fraudulent papers into four categories identified during an initial round of analysis—health, environment, computing, and others—and then determining which subjects were most affected by this issue (see Table 1). Out of the 227 retrieved papers, 88 papers were written with legitimate and/or declared use of GPTs (i.e., false positives, which were excluded from further analysis), and 139 papers were written with undeclared and/or fraudulent use (i.e., true positives, which were included in further analysis). The multiple coding was conducted jointly by all authors of the present article, who collaboratively coded and cross-checked each other’s interpretation of the data simultaneously in a shared spreadsheet file. This was done to single out coding discrepancies and settle coding disagreements, which in turn ensured methodological thoroughness and analytical consensus (see Barbour, 2001). Redoing the category coding later based on our established coding schedule, we achieved an intercoder reliability (Cohen’s kappa) of 0.806 after eradicating obvious differences.

The ranking algorithm of Google Scholar prioritizes highly cited and older publications (Martín-Martín et al., 2016). Therefore, the position of the articles on the search engine results pages was not particularly informative, considering the relatively small number of results in combination with the recency of the publications. Only the query “as of my last knowledge update” had more than two search engine result pages. On those, questionable articles with undeclared use of GPTs were evenly distributed across all result pages (min: 4, max: 9, mode: 8), with the proportion of undeclared use being slightly higher on average on later search result pages.

To understand how the papers making fraudulent use of generative AI were disseminated online, we programmatically searched for the paper titles (with exact string matching) in Google Search from our local IP address (see Appendix B) using the googlesearch – python library(Vikramaditya, 2020). We manually verified each search result to filter out false positives—results that were not related to the paper—and then compiled the most prominent URLs by field. This enabled the identification of other platforms through which the papers had been spread. We did not, however, investigate whether copies had spread into SciHub or other shadow libraries, or if they were referenced in Wikipedia.

We used descriptive statistics to count the prevalence of the number of GPT-fabricated papers across topics and venues and top domains by subject. The pandas software library for the Python programming language (The pandas development team, 2024) was used for this part of the analysis. Based on the multiple coding, paper occurrences were counted in relation to their categories, divided into indexed journals, non-indexed journals, student papers, and working papers. The schemes, subdomains, and subdirectories of the URL strings were filtered out while top-level domains and second-level domains were kept, which led to normalizing domain names. This, in turn, allowed the counting of domain frequencies in the environment and health categories. To distinguish word prominences and meanings in the environment and health-related GPT-fabricated questionable papers, a semantically-aware word cloud visualization was produced through the use of a word rain (Centre for Digital Humanities Uppsala, 2023) for full-text versions of the papers. Font size and y-axis positions indicate word prominences through TF-IDF scores for the environment and health papers (also visualized in a separate bar chart with raw term frequencies in parentheses), and words are positioned along the x-axis to reflect semantic similarity (Skeppstedt et al., 2024), with an English Word2vec skip gram model space (Fares et al., 2017). An English stop word list was used, along with a manually produced list including terms such as “https,” “volume,” or “years.”

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• / Search engines

Cite this Essay

Haider, J., Söderström, K. R., Ekström, B., & Rödl, M. (2024). GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-156

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This research has been supported by Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, through the research program Mistra Environmental Communication (Haider, Ekström, Rödl) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation [2020.0004] (Söderström).

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

The research described in this article was carried out under Swedish legislation. According to the relevant EU and Swedish legislation (2003:460) on the ethical review of research involving humans (“Ethical Review Act”), the research reported on here is not subject to authorization by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (“etikprövningsmyndigheten”) (SRC, 2017).

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All data needed to replicate this study are available at the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WUVD8X

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article manuscript as well as the editorial group of Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review for their thoughtful feedback and input.