Reading and Summarising Sources

Reading and Summarising Sources#

Analysing the literature you found often starts with reading and summarising the information you chose to include in your literature review.

Standard Practice

Scanning, Reading and Note-Taking
Scan the source, followed by more in-depth reading and summarising

AI Assist 1

Generate Initial Summaries of Your Sources
Support your reading and summarising process with AI summaries of your source

AI Assist 2

Generate Audio or Video Summaries
Support your reading and summarising with AI-generated audio or video summaries of your sources

Recap Standard Practice: Scanning, Reading and Note-Taking#

Reading a scientific article means going through the following steps:

  • Decide how much time you have

  • Before reading information scan it

  • Zoom in on the useful information

  • Ask yourself questions

  • Take notes

It can be helpful to create a literature matrix while you are reading your sources and taking notes. A literature matrix is a schematic overview that outlines the literature. It could look like this, for example:

Sub-topic or theme

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

etc.

Sub-topic or theme 1

relevant information from source 1 about theme 1

relevant information from source 2 about theme 1

relevant information from source 3 about theme 1

…

Sub-topic or theme 2

relevant information from source 1 about theme 2

…

…

…

Sub-topic or theme 3

relevant information from source 1 about theme 3

…

…

…

AI Assist 1: Generate Initial Summaries of Your Sources#

Academic literature can be difficult to read. To help facilitate the reading process, you can use local-input tools like NotebookLM, docAnalyzer.ai or ChatPDF to provide you with an initial summary of your sources. It can help you to understand the different parts of an article better before or while you are reading it.

While these tools can save time, AI can get parts of a paper completely or partly wrong. Tools misinterpret papers and cannot be trusted to do this correctly. It is therefore important that you use it to support your reading, and not as a replacement. Moreover, by reading, summarising and synthesising the information yourself, you contribute to your own learning process, and you will miss out on this if you rely on AI to do this for you.

Warning

Be careful and don’t upload sensitive of copyrighted data to AI tools, when in doubt contact the Copyright Information Point

Guided Activity: Generate Initial Summaries of Your Sources

Tool suggestions: NotebookLM, docAnalyzer.ai, ChatPDF

Step 1: Upload Your Source

  • Choose one source (e.g., a PDF) from your reading list.

  • Upload it into a local-input AI tool.

Step 2: Request a Summary

  • Ask the tool to provide a summary of the article

Step 3: Verify With Your Own Reading

  • Scan and read the article yourself.

  • Compare the AI-generated summary to the actual content of the article.

  • Highlight areas where the summary was accurate, incomplete, or misleading.

Step 4: Reflect on the Outcomes

  • How well did the AI capture the main points of the article?

  • Did the summary make it easier to approach or understand the text?

  • Which parts of the article still required your own close reading?

AI Assist 2: Generate Audio or Video Summaries#

Google’s NotebookLM is a local-input tool that provides a lot of ways to engage with sources. Based on the sources you put in, you can ask NotebookLM to provide you with an audio or video summary. While you should remain critical and read the texts yourself, you could use these summaries to guide your initial reading of your sources or to clarify concepts.

Have a look at the relevant parts of this video by Teacher’s Tech to learn how to:

Guided Activity: Generate Audio or Video Summaries to Support Reading

Tool suggestion: Google NotebookLM

Step 1: Upload Your Sources

  • Select one or more articles (e.g., PDFs) you want to understand better.

  • Upload them into NotebookLM.

Step 2: Generate an Audio or Video Summary
Follow along with the video by Teacher’s Tech to:

Step 3: Listen or Watch Critically

  • Play the audio or video summary carefully.

  • Take notes on the key ideas, arguments, or concepts highlighted.

Step 4: Verify With Your Own Reading

  • Scan and read the article yourself.

  • Compare the AI-generated summary to the actual content of the article.

  • Highlight areas where the summary was accurate, incomplete, or misleading.

Step 5: Reflect on the Outcomes

  • Did the audio or video summary help you approach the source more easily?

  • Were there concepts clarified by the summary that supported your understanding?

  • What important details were missing or distorted in the AI output?

Summary and Prompts#

Task

Standard Practice

AI Assist

Tools

Example Prompts

Summarise Sources

Scanning, Reading and Notetaking

Generate Initial Summaries of Your Sources

Local-Input Tools e.g. NotebookLM, docanalyzer.ai

Upload source to tool and generate summary

Generate Audio or Video Summaries

NotebookLM

Upload source to tool and generate audio or video summary

References#

Contents