How to Summarize Scientific Articles

Abstracting a scientific article is the process of summarizing the content of a complete study that has been published in peer-reviewed scientific publications. The abstract of the scientific article gives the reader a brief description of the research, helping them to understand more about the focus of the article. Abstracting scientific articles is also the usual job of university students and research assistants. With a little practice, you can effectively read scientific articles to summarize, brainstorm, and perfect your writing.

Table of Contents

Read the article

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Read the summary. This is a short paragraph written by the author to summarize his research work. The abstract appears in most scientific journals and is usually no more than 100-200 words. This section summarizes the content of the paper and presents the main features of the study.

The purpose of the abstract is to help researchers quickly skim through the contents of a scientific journal and determine whether a particular article is applicable to their work. If you are compiling studies on the immune response of rodents, in just 100 words you will know whether a study is in your industry, and whether its conclusions support or not. different from the results of your research.
Remember that an article summary and a research abstract are two different documents, so an abstract similar to the abstract is a poor summary. ^{[1] X Sources of Research} The abstract has been condensed to the extent that it is not possible to provide sufficient detail about the study and conclusions as a summary. ^{[2] X Research Source}

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Understand the research context. Make sure you are familiar with the topic the authors will comment on or analyze, why the topic needs to be researched, whether this paper was written in response to another paper on the same topic, etc. By In this section, you’ll know which thesis, quote, and data you need to select for analysis in your summary.

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Skip to the conclusion. Read the conclusion first and determine the end point of the study. This way, you will know more about the topic, as well as understand where the outline and complex arguments lead. It’s much easier to absorb the information when you read the researchers’ conclusions in advance.

You’ll still need to re-read the whole paper after you’ve read the conclusion, but only if the research is usable. If you’re gathering research, specifically opposing views, you may not need to look for additional sources to back up your research.

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Identify the main thesis or stance of the article. Make sure you identify these points from the first reading, if you want to avoid re-reading the whole text a second time just to remind yourself of the main idea. While reading, take notes, highlighting or underlining key ideas.

Pay special attention to a few paragraphs at the beginning of the article. This is the part where the author will most likely state the thesis for the whole article. Identify the thesis as well as the main points and points the author is trying to prove through his or her research.
- Words like hypothesis , result , typical , usual or obvious will suggest you the thesis statement .
Underline, highlight, or rewrite the main point of your research in the margins. Focus on this main idea so that you can connect the entire article to it and understand the connection between them.
With the humanities, it can sometimes be difficult to find a clear, concise thesis in a scientific article, because research in this field often revolves around complex and abstract concepts (eg. class issues in postmodern poetry or feminist films). In this case, try to be as specific as possible in order to understand the author’s point of view and what they are trying to prove through their analysis.

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Look for arguments. Continue reading through the sections of the article and highlight the main points commented on by the author. Focus on the key concepts and ideas presented in the article, trying to connect them with the main idea mentioned by the author at the beginning of the article.

The different sections in a scientific paper are often marked by subheadings, and they refer to specific steps or developments in the research process. These headings are usually bold and have a larger font size than the rest of the article.
Note that scientific articles are often very dry. Do you really need to read a 500-word paragraph in a research paper demonstrating the formulation of glycerine solution used on individual frogs? Might be necessary, but most likely not. Usually you don’t need to read every word of a scientific paper, once you have filtered the main idea of the paper and understand why it appears.

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Take notes while reading. Efficiency is the key to successful research and information gathering from scientific articles. Read actively as you seek information from articles. Circle or highlight each part of the article, focusing on the subheadings. ^{[3] X Research Sources}

These sections typically include an introduction, methodology, research findings and conclusions, as well as a list of references.

Brainstorm ideas for drafts

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Brief description of the research work. Quickly draft a description of the research process in the paper, listing the initial steps to the final results, clarifying the methodology and format of the research. You don’t need to go into the details, that’s the goal of the complete summary.

As a beginner, skip the filtering and quickly write down everything you remember from the article. This will help you find the main point to summarize.

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Identify the most important aspects of the article. You can call them the main ideas or parts that support the point. These sections can be identified by subheadings, but they can also be harder to find. You need to include in your summary all the main points used to support your thesis.

Depending on the study, you can either describe the research’s rationale or the researchers’ hypotheses. In scientific writing, you need to clearly summarize the hypotheses put forward by the researchers prior to conducting the research, as well as the procedures to be applied in the research project. Briefly summarize the statistical results obtained and provide a rough explanation of them in the summary.
For articles in the humanities, you should summarize the author’s basic assumptions and school of thought, along with examples and ideas throughout the article.

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Identify key words to include in the summary. Make sure the main keywords used in the article are also included in the abstract. You need to fully consider the meaning of complex terms before drafting a summary, which will help readers understand what your article is about.

Mention and explain any author-created words or terms in the abstract.

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Try to write a brief summary. Abstracts do not need to be as long as scientific articles. This is a separate, concise description of the research work, intended to aid in initial research collection or to aid in information acquisition at later stages of the research process.

As a general rule, you can dedicate one paragraph to each main idea and write a total of 500-1000 words for the summary. Most abstracts will include a few short paragraphs that summarize each section of the paper.

Write a summary

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Don’t use personal pronouns like me, you, we.

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Keep your voice as neutral as possible. You are generalizing, not evaluating scientific papers.

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Start by defining the research question. In the first part of the article, it is possible that in the opening paragraph, the author will mention the focus and objective of the research. This should also be the starting point of the summary. Describe the main point the author wants to prove through your research in your own words.

Scientific articles will often have a prologue that establishes the basis of the entire experiment or study and doesn’t give a lot of information to summarize. This section is followed by research questions and experimental methods, which are important items that influence the rest of the paper.

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Mention the methodology used by the authors. This section comments on research tools and methods. ^{[4] X Research Source} In other words, you need to summarize how the authors or researchers came to conclusions based on the studies or data they directly collected.

It is not necessary to include all details of the experimental method in the summary. The experimental method should be reduced to a simple idea to clarify how the research question is addressed. Research results are usually processed data, sometimes accompanied by raw data before processing. You just need to include the processed data in the summary.

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Description of results. One of the most important parts of the abstract is the results the authors have achieved from their work. ^{[5] X Research Sources} Did they succeed and achieve their research objectives? What conclusions have been made? What were the consequences of the research described in the paper?

Make sure the summary addresses the research question, conclusions/results, and how those results were achieved. These are important parts of the paper and are integral to the abstract.

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Connect the main ideas presented in the paper. For some abstracts, you need to show the correlation between the ideas developed by the author in the paper. The main goal of the abstract is to generalize to the reader the main points made by the author, so you need to analyze and explain these points in your own words. Supplement the missing ideas and hypotheses, clarify and summarize the research content.

Sometimes this step is more important when you have to summarize articles in the humanities. For example, given the thoughtful points about poet George Herbert’s relationship with the gods, analyzing them with a simple summary like the following will benefit your writing: “Author personality culturing Herbert through commentary on the rhythm of everyday life rather than on his philosophies”.

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Do not draw your own conclusions. An abstract should not be an editorial and should not present your own interpretation of the data, unless that is a specific requirement of the article. In general, the purpose of the abstract is to generalize the author’s point of view, not to add your own.

This can be difficult for those who do not have much experience writing research papers, but remember to ignore your ego in the article.

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Avoid quoting directly from scientific articles. Quotations are more commonly used in undergraduate argumentative writing and are not so important to abstracts. Focus on writing the author’s point of view in your own words without losing sight of the meaning or content of those opinions.

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Use present simple. Always use the present simple when you refer to the content of a scientific paper. This will help you maintain a grammatical structure throughout your writing.

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Read and revise drafts. Good articles are formed after the correction process. Compare the focus and content of the abstract to see if they correspond to the content of the article. A good quality scientific article summary gives readers a brief overview of the research, which is important when they are looking for specific information on a certain topic.

Steps

Read the article

Brainstorm ideas for drafts

Write a summary

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