Experts like TEDTalk speakers are experienced in taking vast topics and condensing them into brief talks.
Nowadays, you can summarize texts even faster using AI technology.
It doesn't matter if the topic is as complex as neuroscience and interstellar travel, using the right tools and methodology you can distill large amounts of information into a scannable summary.
In this article, I will share three tools that have completely transformed how Iresearch and summarize articles:
- Asummarization tool that uses AIto produce a reliable summary of the article.
- Three quick-round reading sessions to get the information summary structured in your head.
- A writing method that guarantees your summary stays plagiarism-free.
Get instant summarization with this FREE AI tool >
How to summarize any article in six easy steps
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TED has three simple principles for scripting talks:
- Focus on one major idea
- Make sure the script has a structure
- Ensure each point has a purpose and speaks to your audience
Keeping these principles in mind, we can follow a solid six-step framework to summarize articles.
Step 1: Start summarizing by knowing who you are writing for
Shayla Price, founder of PrimoStats, describes the biggest mistake people make when writing article summaries is that they don’t write for a specific person:
“Writers forget to add details that matter to their specific audience. Article summaries must adjust based on your target audience's goals and concerns. Answer the question: What should my audience do with this new information?” - Shayla Price
To define your audience, read the article’s abstract for a general understanding of what’s inside. While reading the abstract, think about who will read your summary:
- What’s their level of understanding on the subject?
- What information would they find useful?
- What information is irrelevant?
For example, a summary for an article talking about color psychology can have different audiences that require different information:
- A team lead at a marketing agency might want information about color psychology relating to buyer behavior
- An instructor grading a paper you’re writing might want information proving or disproving the thesis for your paper
- Readers of a graphic design blog might want information discussing the validity of color psychology
After setting your audience, you’ll know which information is pertinent for your summary.
Step 2: Read the article three times
TED speakers don’t hop on stage without a deep understanding of the topic they’re presenting, and you can’t write a summary without one either.
A quick pass through your article won’t cut it, but luckily, you don’t need to read it ten times either. Three rounds is plenty.
First round
Consider your first round your passive round. This round is equivalent to laying on a beach with your favorite book. No critical thinking. No re-reading passages over and over to understand them. Your goal is to get the gist of what’s going on within the pages of the article—that’s all.
Second round (PDF summarization example)
Time to start active reading. Highlight important concepts and leave questions in the margins for concepts you don’t understand.
A symbol legend can also be helpful to organize your thoughts, like color-coding your highlights or using symbols to denote key points.
But be careful you aren’t mindlessly highlighting as you read through the text, otherwise you’ll end up too many highlights that don’t provide any value:
To help you highlight, upload the article to Wordtune Read via a PDF, a link to the report, or copy and paste the in the text.
With the highlighted article from Wordtune Read, I can quickly identify and review key points.
Third round
Finally, go through the article one last time and answer the questions you left in the margins. Answering remaining questions gives you a solid understanding of the paper so you’re well-equipped to summarize it.
Step 3: Summarize each page, without plagiarism
Time to write summaries for each page or, if it makes sense, each core section.
Page-level summaries ensure you don’t forget anything relevant when writing a summary for the entire article.
When I uploaded a research paper to Wordtune Read, I got 31 brief summaries. I can copy those summaries and keep them in a separate document. That way, I know I won’t leave out any essential points when I go to write my own summary.
If the summaries don’t fit the audience you intend to write for, you can click the “rewrite” button until you find one that’s suitable.Wordtune Read will help you make sure you summarize the article without plagiarism, since the summarization is automatically paraphrased.
As you read through each of Wortune’s summaries, think back to your target audience. Save any summaries you think they’d find useful by copying or exporting them.
Step 4: Write your summary’s first draft
With Wordtune’s summaries and your marked-up article, it’s time to piece everything together. Again, we can take some direction from TED Talks. TED encourages speakers to have a structured script with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
To write a summary with a clear structure, I recommend using the Inverted Pyramid framework—a journalistic framework designed to take long stories and condense them into bite-sized bits.
Top
- Title of the research paper and author
- Hypothesis
- Key findings
Middle
- Methodology for research
- Supporting research
- Why your audience should care about the findings
Bottom
- Discuss any limitations
- Review the findings
How to summarize articles with the Inverted Pyramid framework
Top
Front load all essential information for your summary with the necessary data your reader needs to know. Include what the study was about (the hypothesis), citations (title of research paper and author), and key findings.
As you’re writing, ask yourself, “why would my audience find this information useful?” If they wouldn’t find it useful, don’t include it.
Middle
Within the middle of your summary, include any details that support the points from above and expand on why your audience should care. This might be methodologies or supporting research mentioned throughout the article.
Bottom
Finish off your summary by discussing any limitations within the research paper, and review the findings one last time so your reader walks away with a clear understanding of your summary.
Other tips for writing your summary
Keep it short
TED Talks have an 18-minute time-limit. Any longer, and TED knows the audience may lose interest. Your summaries should have a limit, too.
Charlene Burke, a business research professional and copywriter, who has 20 years of experience summarizing research papers, marketing research, and competitive intelligence reports says to keep your summary to 10% of the original text. Comb through your sentences and remove any that don’t add value or context to the main point.
Cite and reference
Always reference the author and name of the paper within the first few sentences so your reader knows right away you’re summarizing an article, rather than coming up with the ideas yourself.
If your summary is several paragraphs long, you can also include citations throughout, as a subtle reminder to the reader that again, the ideas you’re presenting aren’t yours.
Focus on one idea
If you present too many findings in your summary, your reader may get confused or you may weaken the research. To pick the one idea that matters most, revisit the audience you set for your summary and what matters to them. Make sure the idea you present in your summary aligns with the information they’ll find most relevant.
Step 5: Edit and polish
Every great writer’s secret weapon? A few rounds of editing.
To start, make sure your summary doesn’t leave your reader longing for more.
For example:
“Color psychology is a popular topic but it might not be creditable.”
This sentence leaves me with questions: Who is color psychology popular with? Why isn’t it creditable?
We can improve this sentence by adding a bit more context:
“Color psychology is popular among graphic designers, but the subject lacks empirical evidence on how it affects buyers’ decisions.”
Afterwards, clean up your summary by fixing clunky sentences. For example:
- Clunky: Although many studies place a focus on a person’s psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses to color, the findings of these studies are often based on small sample sizes and/or small sample groups.
- Fixed: ”Most studies focus on psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses to color, but the findings are often based on small sample sizes.”
Using Wordtune, I rewrote the first sentence and it went from 33 words to 21. The second sentence gets to the point much faster and is easier to read.
Finally, fix any last-minute grammar or spelling mistakes.
Step 6: Get someone else to read your summary
I call this step “the mom test” but you can call it whatever you’d like. Whenever I need to summarize something, I ask my mom to read through my work.
If she understands the main points without knowing about the topic, I know I’ve done a decent job.
Have someone who isn’t familiar with the research paper read through your summary. Does it make sense to them? What unanswered questions do they have after reading it? If you need, go through one final round of edits.
Write article summaries faster with Wordtune
Summarizing articles doesn’t need to be a tedious task that takes hours to complete. Wordtune helps you fast-track the process so you can write compelling summaries in a fraction of the time.
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P.S.
This article was co-written with Wordtune. Wordtune didn’t write the whole piece. Instead, it contributed ideas, suggested rephrasing alternatives, maintained consistency in tone, and of course - made the process much more fun for the writer.
FAQs
How to Summarize an Article More Effectively (Using AI)? ›
AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be used to make summarizing long articles, research papers, and books an easier task. If you're supposed to write a summary for school or work on a body of written text, remember that ChatGPT should be used to help you understand a topic rather than to write your work for you.
Can I use AI to summarize articles? ›AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be used to make summarizing long articles, research papers, and books an easier task. If you're supposed to write a summary for school or work on a body of written text, remember that ChatGPT should be used to help you understand a topic rather than to write your work for you.
What is the best AI tool to summarize articles? ›If you're looking for a tool to help you create a perfect summary quickly and efficiently, look no further than Paraphraser.io. This AI-powered tool is specifically designed to help you generate summaries of any text, whether an article, blog post, or even a book.
What is the AI tool to summarize research articles? ›QuillBot is one of the best summarizing and paraphrasing tools on the list as it can summarize an article, a newspaper, research paper, long and confusing paragraphs in a matter of minutes. It uses natural language processing to locate the most important and relevant information while maintaining the original context.
How do you summarize an article efficiently? ›- 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.
AI text summary writer is an AI-based technology that can generate a summary of a text. These summaries are typically written in English and provided to the reader so they can understand the purpose of a text. In other words, it's an artificial intelligence-powered software that generates summaries of texts.
Is there an app that can summarize articles? ›Scholarcy, the online article summarizer tool, reads your research articles, reports and book chapters in seconds and breaks them down into bite-sized sections – so you can quickly assess how important any document is to your work.
What AI tool is used for paraphrasing? ›- Quillbot.
- Jasper AI.
- Wordtune.
- Copy AI.
- Hypotenuse AI.
- Writesonic.
- Rytr.
One can summarize online using Intellippt and it is the best summarizer. The summarize tool takes input of paragraph and generate the summary paragraph.
Which AI writing tool is best? ›| Tool | Templates | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rytr | 40+, Long form editor |
| 2 | Jasper | 50+, Long form editor |
| 3 | SudoWrite | Long form editor |
| 4 | WordHero | 70+, Long form editor |
What is the best summarizing tool? ›
Text Summarizer is an online summarizing tool that allows you to summarize long texts, paragraphs, and articles with their main concept in one click. It analyzes the entire document and summarizes the text by picking up the most important concepts.
What AI model does Quillbot use? ›We make use of a variety of AI models, with the main model being GPT-3 by OpenAI. GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is an autoregressive language model which uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It's a game changer for content creators.
How do you use AI writing tool? ›- Generate a blog topic using an AI topic-generator tool. ...
- Generate a content brief. ...
- Generate a blog post outline with the AI writer. ...
- Start your blog post with an AI-generated introduction. ...
- Complete sentences and paragraphs using the AI writing assistant.
Graphical displays are very useful for summarizing data, and both dichotomous and non-ordered categorical variables are best summarized with bar charts.
How do you summarize a research article without plagiarizing? ›- Write the summary entirely in your own words by paraphrasing the author's ideas.
- Cite the source with an in-text citation and a full reference so your reader can easily find the original text.
It is best to read the original text, then read the summary, and look for phrases or language that are too similar to the original text. If the summary is too close to the original, then to avoid plagiarism it is best to use a quote or rewrite the summary again in your more of your own words.
What is an open source AI to summarize text? ›- 1- Text Summarizer (Python)
- 2- TEXT-SUMMARIZER (Python)
- 3- SumEval (Python)
- 5- TextSummarizer (C#)
- 6- Summary (JavaScript)
- 7- ParaSum (Python)
- 8- Automated Text Summarization: Automated Research Assistant (ARA)
- 9- summa – textrank.
LexRank Algorithm is an unsupervised approach to summarization and is inspired by the PageRank algorithm. LexRank uses an IDF-modified cosine similarity score to improve the Pagerank score for document summarization. It summarizes the text based on graph-based centrality scoring of sentences.
How does AI essay writing work? ›AI (or Artificial Intelligence) essay writing recruits online software that sifts through information and generates a thoughtful written analysis. Enter a prompt, and AI can turn out a reasonable essay on everything from utilitarianism to the Krebs cycle…for free.
What are the 4 types of AI explained? ›According to the current system of classification, there are four primary AI types: reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-aware.
How to use SummarizeBot? ›
- by interacting (sharing links & files) directly with the bot;
- by using /summarize command (e.g.: /summarize [url for processing]);
- by inviting the bot to the channel (e.g: @SummarizeBot [url for processing]);
- Read the article several times to have a clear idea of its content.
- Inspect the introduction, find the thesis statement and rephrase it.
- Write down the article's key points and phrases so as not to forget them.
State the research question and explain why it is interesting. State the hypotheses tested. Briefly describe the methods (design, participants, materials, procedure, what was manipulated [independent variables], what was measured [dependent variables], how data were analyzed. Describe the results.
How to use AI without plagiarizing? ›- Prepostseo. This paraphrasing tool incorporates artificial intelligence just like every other tool discussed above but unlike other paraphrasing tools, it is completely free. ...
- Paraphraser.io. ...
- WordAi. ...
- Spinner Chief. ...
- Chimp Rewriter.
QuillBot is designed to write with the user, strengthening original ideas and text. If a user takes someone else's writing and tries to pass it off as their own, that is considered cheating, whether QuillBot was used or not.
Is Jasper AI better than QuillBot? ›Jasper AI is a lot more expensive than Quillbot, but is far the superior AI tool. It will also give you a paraphrasing tool, or a summarizer tool, but it comes with much more than that. Jasper AI will actually let you compose new text, and it does an excellent job of it.
Can AI summarize a text? ›AI can now effectively and accurately summarize text! With recent advancements, there are now several apps and APIs available that use artificial intelligence to summarize text for you, making it a breeze to understand the key takeaways from a lengthy document.
Can I turn a PDF into AI? ›The easy way to convert PDF to AI.
Select File from the Illustrator menu. Locate and open the PDF you want to convert. Select Save As and choose the AI file type. Click Save to convert and begin editing.
AI files are essentially vector image files made with the use of a famous vector graphics editing software: Adobe Illustrator. The common application for this file type is in logo design and print media. A PDF, on the other hand, is a document file format that can contain text, images, and other types of data.
Is there an AI app that writes text? ›Rytr is an AI writing assistant that helps you create high-quality content, in just a few seconds, at a fraction of the cost!
What is the new AI for paper writing? ›
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is the latest viral sensation out of San Francisco-based startup OpenAI. It's a free online tool trained on millions of pages of writing from all corners of the internet to understand and respond to text-based queries in just about any style you want.
What is the best AI tool for content writing for free? ›- Writesonic.
- Jasper.
- Grammarly Business.
- Anyword.
- Rytr.
- Simplified.
- Notion.
- Peppertype.ai.
1. HiveMind. HiveMind is an AI-powered tool that automates writing tasks such as data extraction and summarization. This tool leverages NLP algorithms to generate summaries of long articles or documents quickly and accurately.
What are the disadvantages of AI writing tools? ›- There is always the potential for errors when using automated systems like AI writers, and these errors could have serious consequences if they were to go undetected.
- The use of AI in content writing may result in a lack of creativity or human touch in the final product.
Accuracy. One of the cons of using AI writing tools is that they might not be 100% accurate. That said, AI is constantly learning and improving. The more articles you write, the more the AI will learn and improve.
What is the Big 5 technique in summarizing? ›The Five W's, One H strategy relies on six crucial questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. These questions make it easy to identify the main character, important details, and main idea. Who is the story about? What did they do?
What are the 3 summarizing techniques? ›...
They are discussed hereunder.
- Selection : Selection is an important summarization technique. ...
- Rejection : Rejection is an important summarization technique. ...
- Substitution : It is also an important summarization technique.
A good summary should be comprehensive, concise, coherent, and independent. These qualities are explained below: A summary must be comprehensive: You should isolate all the important points in the original passage and note them down in a list.
Which AI paraphrasing tool for research paper? ›QuillBot's AI-powered paraphrasing tool will enhance your writing. Your words matter, and our paraphrasing tool is designed to ensure you use the right ones. With two free modes and five Premium modes to choose from, you can use QuillBot's online Paraphraser to rephrase any text in a variety of ways.
Does QuillBot detect AI writing? ›The short answer is “no.” QuillBot's tools have specific uses, such as correcting grammar or paraphrasing sentences.
Why is QuillBot so good? ›
QuillBot is the best pick for academics, essayists, and writers due to its ability to slash the writing time to half, and rephrase the content, making it look more professional by finding the relevant synonyms and vocabulary enhancements. Due to its in-built features, you do not have to spend money on multiple tools.
Can you write articles with AI? ›In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made incredible strides in its ability to generate human-like text. As a result, AI writing is becoming increasingly commonplace, with businesses and organisations using it to create everything from marketing copy to financial reports.
Is Grammarly an AI tool? ›Grammarly's AI system combines machine learning with a variety of natural language processing approaches. Human language has many levels at which it can be analyzed and processed: from characters and individual words through grammatical structures and sentences, even paragraphs or full texts.
Is there a free AI text generator? ›WordAi is an AI writing generator that helps you create: Quick and easy blog posts.
What is the easiest way to summarize? ›- 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 correct answer is "Pivot Table". Key PointsPivot Table: We can use pivot tables to sort, reorganize, group, count, total or average data stored in a database. They are the perfect solution when you need to summarize and analyze large amounts of information.
What is the 4 2 1 summarizing strategy? ›First, students identify four key ideas. Next, they narrow them to two key ideas. Finally, they decide on the most important main idea. After evaluating the main points, they write a summary in paragraph form.
Is there an app that summarizes? ›QuillBot's Summarizer can condense articles, papers, or documents down to the key points instantly. Our AI uses natural language processing to locate critical information while maintaining the original context.
What should you avoid in summarizing? ›Avoid writing opinions or personal responses in your summaries (save these for active reading responses or tutorial discussions). Be careful not to plagiarize the author's words. If you do use even a few of the author's words, they must appear in quotation marks.
Is it possible to plagiarize if you are only summarizing a text? ›NOTE: When you summarize, you must still cite your source. Even when putting source information in your own words, you must still cite the idea. Failure to do so is a form of plagiarism.
Is there a tool to summarize articles? ›
Scholarcy, the online article summarizer tool, reads your research articles, reports and book chapters in seconds and breaks them down into bite-sized sections – so you can quickly assess how important any document is to your work.
How to copy and paste without getting caught for plagiarizing? ›For research-based written work, there are rules to follow in order not to be accused of copying/pasting or plagiarism: put text in quotes, add references and footnotes, apply citation standards, write a bibliography, etc.
What is the difference between summarizing paraphrasing and plagiarizing? ›Ending your writing with a summary helps your reader to remember your main points. Plagiarism is neither paraphrasing nor summarizing information from other works. Plagiarism is representing another's work as your own.
What are the best AI summarizer? ›If you're looking for a tool to help you create a perfect summary quickly and efficiently, look no further than Paraphraser.io. This AI-powered tool is specifically designed to help you generate summaries of any text, whether an article, blog post, or even a book.
Can OpenAI summarize an article? ›Users will be able to summarize articles by tapping on the "Aa" icon in the top menu, and then clicking on "Summarize."
What is an AI tool for summarizing a research paper? ›QuillBot is one of the best summarizing and paraphrasing tools on the list as it can summarize an article, a newspaper, research paper, long and confusing paragraphs in a matter of minutes. It uses natural language processing to locate the most important and relevant information while maintaining the original context.
What is AI summarization? ›Text summarization refers to the technique of shortening long pieces of text. The intention is to create a coherent and fluent summary having only the main points outlined in the document.
Can universities detect AI essays? ›Universities are reportedly cracking down on the use of AI to cheat on essays and online exams, with Turnitin revealing it has established software to detect if a student has used a chatbot to produce their work.
How to use AI in academic writing? ›The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing can be divided into two broad categories: those that assist authors in the writing process; and those that are used to evaluate and assess the quality and validity of written work.
What are the 4 key principles of AI? ›This article provides a a breakdown of four of the eight principles: bias evaluation, explainability, human augmentation, and reproducibility. In a sense, AI models carry inherent biases as they are designed to discriminate towards the relevant answers.
What are three 3 main categories of AI algorithms? ›
There are three major categories of AI algorithms: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. The key differences between these algorithms are in how they're trained, and how they function.
Can I use AI for content writing? ›A slate of writing tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have recently made headlines as a new and more effective way to produce content. Most tech companies have even been implementing AI into their own tools as well, like we did earlier this year when we launched our AI assistant.
Can I use AI to write a research paper? ›AI writing assistance software allows researchers to write manuscripts free of common language and grammatical mistakes. Besides efficiently correcting such errors, AI tools catering to scholarly content also ensure the correct use of discipline-specific terminology.
Can I use AI to write my essay? ›You can use AI to write essays on any topic you want, and they will be able to write at a college level without making too many mistakes in grammar or writing style. Any business owner or marketing manager can make money online by having AI provide short and long articles for their website, social media, and/or blog.
Which AI tool is best for content writing? ›- Writesonic.
- Jasper.
- Grammarly.
- ChatGPT.
- CopyAI.
- Anyword.
- Frase.
Google can't automatically detect content generated by AI and as such, can't penalize it.
Can Google tell if content is written by AI? ›Correct: Google has become increasingly adept at detecting AI content. It uses a variety of techniques to identify and flag machine-generated content, including natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that analyze the text for patterns and syntax that are common in computer-generated writing.
Which AI tool is best for research paper? ›- Consensus.
- Elicit.org.
- Scite.ai.
- Research Rabbit.
AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical.
Can colleges detect AI writing? ›Universities are reportedly cracking down on the use of AI to cheat on essays and online exams, with Turnitin revealing it has established software to detect if a student has used a chatbot to produce their work.
Can Turnitin detect AI writing? ›
Turnitin's AI detector provides an evaluative measure of how many sentences in a written submission may have been generated by artificial intelligence, which educators can use to determine if further review, inquiry or discussion with the student is needed.
What percent of students use AI to write essays? ›A survey of 1,000 U.S. college students found that nearly a third of them had used the AI chatbot ChatGPT to complete written homework assignments, and close to 60 percent use it on more than half of their work. A graphic from Intelligent.com shows how often ChatGPT users tap the program to write essays.