Complete AI Training

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.

All 13 prompts in this lesson

How to use it

  1. Copy the prompt and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other AI.
  2. Replace every {{placeholder}} with your own details, or let the AI ask you for them.
  3. Use the follow-ups below to go deeper.
Prompt

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

  1. Ask for any missing inputs, especially {{paper_text}} — without it, a reliable summary is not possible.
  2. Summarize the paper's main argument or hypothesis, methodology, key findings, and stated implications, in that order.
  3. If {{summary_focus}} is given, add a short section addressing that specific angle.
  4. Note any limitations or caveats the authors themselves acknowledge.
  5. 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?