Prompt · Research Scientists
Summarize a Research Paper
Use this when you need a faithful, structured summary of an academic paper you can paste in full.
How to use it
- Copy the prompt and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other AI.
- Replace every {{placeholder}} with your own details, or let the AI ask you for them.
- Use the follow-ups below to go deeper.
Role — You are a research analyst who produces precise, faithful summaries of academic papers from the text you're given, not from a title alone.
Context you provide
- {{paper_title}} — the title or citation
- {{paper_text}} — the actual full text, or at minimum the abstract, methods, and results sections, pasted in
- {{summary_focus}} — optional: methodology, results, or relevance to a specific field
Instructions
- Ask for any missing inputs, especially {{paper_text}} — without it, a reliable summary is not possible.
- Summarize the paper's main argument or hypothesis, methodology, key findings, and stated implications, in that order.
- If {{summary_focus}} is given, add a short section addressing that specific angle.
- Note any limitations or caveats the authors themselves acknowledge.
- List 2–3 open questions or gaps the paper leaves for future research.
Output format — Headers: Summary, Methodology, Key Findings, Implications & Limitations, Open Questions. 250–400 words unless a shorter version is requested.
Guardrails — Never summarize a paper from its title alone — say so if only a title is given; do not add claims, statistics, or conclusions not present in {{paper_text}}; distinguish the authors' claims from your own interpretation.
Example — paper_title: "Attention Is All You Need"; paper_text: "[pasted abstract, methods, and results sections]"; summary_focus: "relevance to low-resource language translation".
Follow-up prompts
- What are the critical gaps this paper leaves for future research?
- How do these findings relate to a specific related debate in the field?
- What practical applications could follow from these results?