How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising?
Fine. But how do you do that? Advice on this is harder to find, leaving many of us tearing our hair out in frustration. I know that’s how I felt, back when I was surrounded by piles of papers and stacks of notes and wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing with it all.
That’s why I’m dedicating this blog, the first of 2026, to the how in how to stop summarising and start synthesising.
But First, Some Preliminaries
Summarising is what happens if you describe individual studies one at a time (this study said this; that study showed that). This doesn’t put anything new in the world – it only reports on information that already exists. Synthesis, in contrast, is all about finding patterns in previous research and coming to grips with what those patterns reveal about your research question and why it should be asked. To synthesise, you need to take a good hard look at the findings from previous studies on your topic and figure out how they relate to each other – what story they tell about the direction of travel in your field and what impact your research question will have on that direction.
You are not describing studies one at a time. You are analysing the findings from those studies to uncover relevant patterns. In your literature review, finding these patterns and setting out your account of why they matter is part of how you make your original contribution. A synthesis puts something new in the world; a summary describes what is already there.
Getting Down to Brass Tacks
So how exactly do you go about doing this synthesis thing? First, isolate all the findings. I do this by quoting or paraphrasing each finding on individual note cards, one finding per card, each with an author/year/page attribution. Remember that one study might have multiple findings, so you need a card for each finding, not a card for each study. You can do this in batches as you proceed through your reading, updating as you go. But for each batch, you probably need 25-30 findings to start tracing out meaningful patterns.
Looking for personalised help with the ins and outs of synthesis? Book on to one of my How to Really Write Your Literature Review workshops. For an evening session on January 13th, click here. For a morning session on January 16th, click here (all times are GMT; workshops are online via Zoom).
Once you’ve liberated the findings from the matrix of the studies so that you can concentrate on them, start your search for patterns. The best way to do this is by asking questions.
The specific questions you ask will depend on your particular research area, but here are 12 examples to get you started, one for each month of our glorious New Year 🥳
- Which of the findings are broadly in agreement?
