How to Summarize an Article: A Step-by-Step Method for Academic Writing

Summarizing means boiling a whole source down to its main topic and the handful of points that support it, in your own words. The result is much shorter than the original: the Purdue OWL's guidance uses a one-page summary of a four-page article as its example. Paraphrasing does something else. It restates one specific passage or claim at close to the same length and keeps that passage's level of detail.

If you need to work closely with one sentence rather than give the gist of a whole article, see What is paraphrasing? instead. In practice the two often go together: a writer summarizes a source for background, then paraphrases the one sentence they actually need to engage with.

Read the article once without taking notes. Then write one sentence that names its topic and what the author is doing with it: arguing a claim, reporting a finding, explaining a process, or reviewing existing work. UC Irvine's Writing Center suggests looking for "the thesis or overall claim the author is presenting," along with the main reasons offered to back it. The rest of your summary hangs on that sentence, so get it right before you move on to supporting detail.

Name the title and author the first time you mention the source, so readers know right away whose claim they're reading. From there on, keep the summary in your own words.

Go back through the article and mark the sentences that carry a supporting point. Often that's the topic sentence of each major section. Keep three to five of them, however long the original is, and cut the rest:

• Specific numbers, named studies, and examples that illustrate a point you're already keeping
• Quotations, since a summary restates ideas rather than quoting them
• Your own opinion or analysis of whether the argument holds up; save that for a separate paragraph if your assignment calls for one
• Any point that only repeats or elaborates one you've already listed

Draft the summary from your notes, with the article closed. Writing with the source open in a second window is how you end up with its sentences and a few swapped words. Use the present tense for what the author argues or explains. George Mason University's Writing Center gives "He explains the author's intention and purpose in the article" as the more common form in academic writing and calls the present simple the "default." Its guide lists the past tense for reporting a specific study's findings and for describing the methods of a completed experiment ("the researchers surveyed 400 students in 2024").

Worked example

Sample source passage (invented for this example, 128 words): "Urban beekeeping grew rapidly after several large cities lifted zoning restrictions on hives in the early 2020s. Advocates argued that rooftop and backyard colonies would help offset losses in commercial pollinator populations and give city residents a visible stake in local ecology. New hobbyist registrations in participating cities rose for three consecutive years. Entomologists who studied the trend found a more complicated picture, however. In dense urban centers, the new hives often competed with native, wild bee species for the same limited flowering plants, and colony density in several neighborhoods exceeded what local forage could support. Several cities have since introduced permit caps tied to green-space density per hive, rather than removing the zoning change outright, to keep the benefits of urban beekeeping without crowding out wild pollinators."

Summary (3 sentences): After zoning changes in the early 2020s, urban beekeeping spread fast, and supporters present it as a way to make up for pollinator losses and connect residents with nature. Entomologists found a cost: in crowded neighborhoods, the hives compete with native wild bees for scarce flowers. Several cities now tie hive permits to local green space instead of reversing the zoning change.

The summary keeps three things: the topic (urban beekeeping policy), the main tension (benefit to pollinators versus competition with wild bees), and the current response (permits tied to green space). It drops the registration figures and the detail about forage limits. Every remaining idea comes back in a new sentence structure with new verbs, not in the source's phrasing with a word or two changed.

An empirical research paper usually follows a predictable structure, often called IMRaD: introduction, methods, results, and discussion. That lets you summarize it section by section. The University of Washington's Psychology Writing Center says to "use the same order as in the article itself." As a rough guideline, it suggests one sentence each for the question, the hypothesis, and the implications, and one to three each for the methods and the results.

Example (a fictional study, 3 sentences): Rivera and Chen (2023) tested whether a five-minute quiz after each lecture raised final exam scores in an introductory statistics course. Across two sections with 212 students in total, the quiz section averaged 6 points higher on the 100-point final than the section that reread its notes. The authors credit retrieval practice but note that students were not randomly assigned to sections.

The design and the result are in the past tense. The authors' interpretation is in the present, as Step 3 describes.

The wording of a summary is yours. The ideas and the argument are not, so the summary needs a citation. Purdue OWL lists "must reference the original source" for summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting alike. You need an in-text citation plus a full entry in your reference list (APA) or works-cited list (MLA). The in-text part depends on how much of the source you summarized.

APA Style covers summarizing in its guidance on paraphrases and makes page numbers optional. Add one when it would help readers find the passage "within a long or complex work." The MLA Style Center says page numbers are "not normally needed" for a whole work. For a summarized scene from a novel, it suggests page numbers "so that your reader can find the passage."

Name the source where the summary begins, as in Step 1. In APA style, one citation then covers the sentences that follow, as long as the context makes clear that the same work continues. A new paragraph or a switch to another source needs a new citation. How to cite a paraphrase explains this rule for long paraphrases. Also name the source again wherever a reader could mistake your own comment for the author's point.

Write the summary yourself first. Deciding which three to five points survive is a judgment call only you can make, because it depends on what your own paper needs from that source. A first draft can still read a little stiff, especially if you wrote it from dense notes.

Polishing that draft is a separate job from summarizing. The Certentis Humanizer takes a draft you've already written and smooths its phrasing. It is built to leave your claims and citations as they are, but compare the result with your draft before you keep it. It can tighten a summary you wrote. It doesn't decide what belongs in one.