Summarising is important in research papers because it is key to driving engagement. While it is true that research papers are not written with the intent to drive engagement and garner traffic, it doesn’t hurt if you still keep those things in mind. After all, humans are going to read it at some point.
With summaries, students can make sure that their professors and peers can easily understand their papers. Summaries provide an easy way to understand the key takeaways and findings of a paper without having to read the whole thing.
It also helps people to follow your paper easily because they can understand the core arguments. That’s why it is important for a student to summarise their research paper.
Now, let’s see how they can do that.
Read the Paper Thoroughly
A research paper is a pretty hefty write-up. It can be pretty long and the amount of technical stuff in it can be really difficult to understand. Even you as the writer may sometimes forget what the thread of your argument is. To find that thread the student needs to read their work thoroughly.
Here is how you can do that.
- Read the paper aloud.
- Have someone else read the paper
- Discuss with them what they understood to be the main point
- Take notes of what you think are the main arguments
This should help you understand what the paper is about. As a student, you will have many peers to consult, so points 2 and 3 should not be a problem. Anyway, once that is done, you can move on to the next step.
Identify the Thesis Statement and Its Supporting Arguments
The thesis statement is the central theme of the research paper. Everything else in the research paper is there to support this theme. All the arguments and results exist only to prove that the central argument is true.
It is easy to identify it because usually, a student would have written it in their introduction. As the writer, you should not have a problem understanding it. Then you want to check which of your arguments are directly related to the thesis statement. These are what will be included in the summary.
Take notes and write these down as you will need them in the next step. Just to reiterate, you need to identify and write down the thesis statement and the arguments related to it. After that, you can begin writing the summary.
Write Your Summary Using Your Notes
Now that you have your notes ready, start writing a coherent summary. You will be able to do it with ease since a) it is your paper, and b) you already know everything about it. Just take your time and crunch out a summary.
Once it is done, you have to start proofreading your work. You want to check for the following things.
- Does the summary follow the same logical flow as the paper?
- Are the arguments still coherent in their shortened form?
- Are there any spelling mistakes or readability issues?
- Does the summary cover everything?
Those are the things you need to check for. Once you do find any issues, simply address them and that’s it. Your summary is ready.
Alternative Way of Summarising a Research Paper
There is an alternate method of summarising. It almost completely bypasses the manual effort required for summarising. It entails the use of a summarizer tool. A summariser is an online tool that can create extractive summaries of the given text.
You can find such tools pretty easily online and the great thing is that most of them are free. As students that is probably the best thing you can hear about a tool. Anyway, here is how to use such tools.
Find an Online Summariser
The first step is to go online and search for a summariser tool. To do that:
- Open a browser of your choice,
- Navigate to a search engine of your choice,
- Type the phrase “summariser tool” or some variation of it.
This will show you plenty of search results. Most of these results will consist of tools. Students can select any of the results and check them out. Here are our recommendations for what to look for in a good tool.
- It must be free
- It must not require registration
- It must not have a word limit
- It should let you control the length of the summary
- The output should have options for formatting.
Such tools are typically top-ranking and will be found among the first 10 results. So, it shouldn’t take too much time to find one.
Input Your Text and Summarise it
Once students have found a tool that fulfills all their requirements it is time to get to work. Simply put they have to do two things.
- Input their research paper content into the summariser
- Get the summarised output
Both are simple things. To input the content, students can simply copy and paste it into the summariser’s text box. All summarising tools have one and it is quite conspicuous. Some tools have the option to upload a file from the local storage of your device. You can use that option as well.
As for getting the summary, you first want to tweak the settings a little bit. It is recommended that you set the output length to 60% just to get a feel for things and adjust it later on.
Once the settings have been tweaked, you just want to press the button that says “summarise” and boom your output will be presented to you in a few seconds.
Once you have the output, just one thing remains.
Proofread the summary
You cannot trust tools blindly, they can be inaccurate sometimes and that’s why you should proofread the generated summary to ensure that it has not missed anything.
You may have to tweak the length a few times because when you shorten it too much, a lot of key points get left out. With proofreading you can find these errors and fix them.
Tools will provide an adequate summary most of the time, but it is recommended that you pad their output a little bit to make it more comprehensive. It is our experience that you can use the summary generated by a tool as an aid.
You can create your own summary using the one generated by a tool. It helps because you can skip a lot of steps and don’t have to start from scratch.
Also, relying on a tool completely will damage your own summarising skills as you won’t be able to practice them at all. It is better to avoid becoming reliant on tools and develop your own skills.
Conclusion
That concludes our guide on how university students can summarise their research papers. The methods of summarising are simple and straightforward however, they require some honest effort.
Students can summarise their papers by understanding the thesis statement and which arguments support it and then writing them down in a concise way.
Alternatively, they can use a summarising tool to create a summary of their research paper quickly. Summarising tools can be tinkered with until they make the best summary.
This summary should not be used as is, instead, it should be proofread and then padded so as to make it complete and comprehensive. In this way, university students can create summaries of their research papers quickly and effectively.
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