How Do I Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising? Top Tips to Keep You on Track in 2026

How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising? 

This is an excellent question. And a very fair one. Research textbooks, advisors, the handy checklists and self-study videos – all of them will tell you that a literature review must synthesise previous sources, not summarise them. 

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 🥳

1. Which of the findings are broadly in agreement?
2. What is the basis of that agreement? For example, let’s say you are doing a study on mindfulness in the workplace. Are there multiple findings from different studies that all show it correlates with increased productivity? If so, that might be a useful pattern for you, part of the evidence for why your research question needs to be asked. Put all those findings together and give that pattern a name, something like ‘mindfulness correlating with increased productivity’. 
3.  What other themes emerge in the body of findings? Gather and name as above. Concentrate on what the findings actually purport to show, rather than simply what they are about. 
4.  Do contrasts and disagreements emerge? To stay with the mindfulness example, do some of the findings indicate that it is a net positive in the workplace, while others show that it is neutral at best but in the main a net negative? 
5.  Do the findings fall unevenly into a main consensus view and a smaller number of minority reports? 
6.  Is it time to question the consensus view? Why? Is there something in the minority reports that needs closer attention? 
7. Do most of the current findings all seem in response to or downstream of a particular landmark paper? 
8. Does that paper need revisiting? For example, is the current response to it based on an inaccurate idea of what that paper said, or what it actually said? 
9. Does previous work tend to seize on one particular thing or issue at the expense of other relevant phenomena? If you study fiction and drama, for example, you tend to find lots of work on certain passages, characters, or scenes while others receive much less attention. 
10. Does the tendency to pay more attention to certain things at the expense of others skew previous work in an interesting way? 
11. Now that you’ve got the hang of this, go back to your stack of studies and isolate the research questions being asked. Any interesting patterns here? What gets asked about most? What gets asked about least? 
12. Do the same with the methodology and methods. How did the previous findings come about? Do they mostly emerge from qualitative work? Or quantitative work? From large scale studies or small ones? Is there a pervasive weakness, like a tendency to rely on self-reported evidence?

As noted above, you might ask these questions, or you might ask others, depending on what your topic is. The important thing is to ask questions that get you looking for patterns and trends across the body of research in your field, instead of describing studies one by one.

Want a more in-depth treatment? Join one of my upcoming How to Really Write Your Literature Review workshops. For an evening session on January 13th, click here. For a morning sessions on January 16th, click here (all times in GMT; workshops are online via Zoom). Spaces are limited so book today. 

Your Blog Author and Workshop Deliverer

Your blog author and workshop deliverer is me, Dr Susan Mandala, founding director of Writing Works Consulting. I have a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was for many years an academic at the University of Sunderland, where one of my favourite roles was training doctoral candidates to write literature reviews. A specialist in the study of language, writing, and style, I have 30 years of experience as a teacher, trainer, and workshop facilitator. 

Have a few questions before you book onto a workshop? Leave a comment here on the blog, schedule a video chat, or hop over to my website and contact me from there.