Why does a summary need to be structured?
What is a structured summary? And how does it help students tackle reading complex text? Scholarcy's structured summary is cleverly designed to make even the toughest of texts accessible to students of any level.
Why does a summary need to be structured? Surely the info is just there?
Structured summaries are great for a number of reasons, whether you’re trying to dissect one sub-section of a study, navigating to the section you left off, or just want to reduce mental load, structured summaries are ideal for any student or researcher approaching complex academic text.
Why structure matters
The original article you imported to be summarised will have been structured in some way before Scholarcy transformed it into a bite-sized summary. Academic journals usually expect authors to write in the IMRaD structure, which is great for academics that have been reading articles for decades, but can be challenging for students new to academic literature.
Scholarcy extracts the pertinent information, key facts, and figures, and presents them in a useful structure which allows you to understand the original content, without having to tackle a wall of text.
Navigation wins
Being able to effortlessly navigate between sections means you don’t have to trawl through text if you lose your place, and refreshing yourself on a particular section is as easy as clicking a button!
Reducing mental load
How does a structured summary reduce mental load?
Having distinct sections to read through enables students who struggle with reading traditional articles to more easily navigate working through the content from an academic journal.
Scholarcy’s structured summary allows students to pause whilst they’re reading, without losing their place. The distinct structure also allows readers to process sub-sections from the original work without feeling rushed to move onto the next section.
How to take advantage of Scholarcy’s structured summary
Students can use Scholarcy’s structured summary to effortlessly screen articles just from reading the Snapshot section – This will tell students everything they need to know to determine if the article fits into their research question, and if it is worth reading in full.
The key findings section is perfect for those wanting a quick overview of the 5 main takeaways from an article. This section can be useful during the screening process, but is also beneficial for anyone wanting to read the full summary or even article. Having knowledge of the 5 main takeaways will let you pre-empt the information coming up later in the article, which can make reading faster, and improve your understanding.
Having an individual section for the objectives, methods, results, and conclusion, will help anyone to digest the complex new information from the article, which they can read at their own pace.
Learn more about how Scholarcy makes building knowledge easy with our short overview of the Structured summary:
