Writing a review paper? Synthesize, don’t summarize your results

The final project for our master’s degree students is a systematic review. The hardest part of this project is developing the research question. The second hardest part is describing the results. The biggest problem: students summarize individual studies rather than synthesizing the information. But what does it mean to synthesize?

Before we answer the question about what it means to synthesize, let’s start with a discussion of summarizing because it will help to explain the difference between the two concepts. When you summarize a study, you describe it. Who were the participants, how was the study conducted, what were the findings, how well was the study conducted? Then you repeat this with the next study. And the next. But if I am reading a review, I’m expecting more. I can read the original studies myself!

Your job is to do some deep thinking about what your studies have concluded. Do not simply have multiple summary paragraphs devoted to describing each study. Rather, share what we can learn from COLLECTIVELY looking at the included studies. This is synthesizing - using information we have to create new perspectives, ideas, and ways to move your field of study forward.

To help you synthesize, find some themes to organize your findings around. Did some studies report specific outcomes? For a sleep review, you could organize a paragraph(s) on outcomes related to sleep quality and another paragraph(s) on sleep duration. A review on the effects of calcium on an outcome might be organized around supplementation (pills) vs. dairy consumption (food); discussion of the supplements studies might be organized by which studies provided which forms of calcium, if that's an important consideration that might change outcomes. Maybe age or weight status is important, so you could organize by kids vs. adults or body mass index. Think about the factors that could change outcomes, and present the findings based on these factors.

One important note: there is more than one lens you can use in most reviews, so one paragraph might discuss four studies (effects of calcium supplementation at different life stages), and another paragraph might discuss two of those studies again with three other studies (effects of calcium supplementation based on body mass index category). Remember, your job is to tell us what we can learn from the literature as a whole, not just what we can learn from each individual study. Don’t simply summarize. Synthesize!

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