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Can I Use an AI to Summarise Research Papers for Me?

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😞 This blog begins with a big sigh because, yes, these days, you can now use an AI to summarise papers for you.  ➡️ But should you? That is another question entirely.  You’ll make your own decision on this one as the glorious, sovereign individual you are. 😊 ⚠️ But speaking for myself, my decision on this one is a very firm NO and in this blog I outline three reasons why.  📚 If you get an AI to summarise a paper for you, you are not reading it for yourself. It doesn’t matter how good the summary is, or how thorough, or how shiny the new AI is.  If you yourself don’t read the original, you can’t really know what it said.  You remain ignorant of the paper’s actual premises and claims because you don’t have any real knowledge -- you only have what Shane Parrish (2023: 165)* calls the ‘illusion of knowledge’. Your job in your literature review is to evaluate previous work to make the case for why your research question should be asked, and you can’t make any goo...
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How Do I Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising? Top Tips to Keep You on Track in 2026

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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 f...
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Your Literature Review Is An Argument

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As you are preparing to do your literature review, you might be reading up on them.  Most research methodology textbooks have a chapter or two on the literature review, as do the many guides you can find on writing your dissertation or thesis project.  Such texts can be useful in many ways, and when it comes to the literature review they will typically tell you a host of things.  The literature review is where you demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of your field.  The literature review is where you critically appraise prior research relevant to your topic. The literature review is where you identify common themes, patterns, and issues in the existing body of research.  The literature review is where you assess previous findings in relation to methodological strengths and weaknesses.  The literature review is where you define what has been done in your field and delineate what has not been done. A good literature review will do all of these things.  Howe...
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