Courtesy of Virginia Commonwealth Libraries
Read in 3 passes
Pass 1
Get a sense of the framework and major conclusions; underline unfamiliar words, methods, and concepts; evaluate the quality of the study
Pass 2
Scan the full text of the article, getting a better sense of the research conducted
Pass 3
Reflect on and analyze the paper (this analysis can often be used in your own paper)
Use this template as you read through scholarly articles to help you pick out the relevant elements for your paper.
While a summary is a way of concisely relating important themes and elements from a larger work or works in a condensed form, a synthesis takes the information from a variety of works and combines them together to create something new.
Synthesis:
"Synthesis is similar to putting a puzzle together—piecing together information to create a whole. The outcome of this synthesis might be numeric, such as in an overall rating perhaps best typified in a quantitative weight and sum strategy, or through the use of meta-analysis, or the synthesis might be textual, such as in an analytic conclusion."
Basic steps for synthesizing information:
Synthesis. (2005). In Mathison, S. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of evaluation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412950558
After you have found all of your relevant sources, you can now create a research paper outline. Here is a helpful resource from Algonquin College to assist you with creating an outline.
1. Don't search as a single phrase - instead, break your topic up into main concepts and place each concept on its own search line, separated by AND
2. Not finding enough sources? Think of synonyms for each of your concepts and combine them with ORS
3. Use truncations to include multiple variations of a word, i.e. persist* (includes persist, persistence, and persistent)
4. Use the Peer Reviewed or Scholarly Articles limiters in your search results