Best Summarizing Tool for Academic Texts

✅ 11 Best Summary Generators to Consider

We’re here to offer the whole list of text summarizers in this article. Every tool has a strong algorithm so you won’t have to proofread a lot in order to make the summary look hand-written. The usage of such websites can be productive for your studying as long as you can focus on more important tasks and leave this routine work to online tools.

In this blog post, you’ll also find tips on successful summarizing and proofreading. These are basic skills that you will need for many assignments. To summarize text better, you’ll need to read it critically, spot the main idea, underline the essential points, and so on. As for proofreading, this skill is useful not only to students but also to professional writers.

⚙️ 11 Best Summarizing Tools

To summarize a text, a paragraph or even an essay, you can find a lot of tools online. Here we’ll list some of these, including those that allow choose the percent of similarity and define the length of the text you’ll get.

If you’re asked to summarize some article or paragraph in your own words, one of these summary makers can become significant for getting fast results. Their user-friendly design and accurate algorithms play an important role in the summary development.

1. Summarize Bot

Summarize Bot is an easy-to-use and ad-free software for fast and accurate summary creation in our list. With its help, you can save your time for research by compressing texts. The summary maker shows the reading time, which it saves for you, and other useful statistics. To summarize any text, you should only send the message in Facebook or add the bot to Slack. The app works with various file types: including PDF, mp3, DOC, TXT, jpg, etc., and supports almost every language.

The only drawback is the absence of web version. If you don’t have a Facebook account and don’t want to install Slack, you won’t be able to enjoy this app’s features.

2. SMMRY

SMMRY has everything you need for a perfect summary—easy to use design, lots of features, and advanced settings (URL usage). If you look for a web service that changes the wording, this one would never disappoint you.

SMMRY allows you to summarize the text not only by copy-pasting but also with the file uploading or URL inserting. The last one is especially interesting. With this option, you don’t have to edit an article in any way. Just put the URL into the field and get the result. The tool is ad-free and doesn’t require registration.

3. Jasper

Jasper is an AI-powered summary generator. It creates unique, plagiarism-free summaries, so it’s a perfect option for those who don’t want to change the wording on their own.

When using this tool, you can summarize a text of up to 12,000 characters (roughly 2,000-3,000 words) in more than 30 languages. Although Jasper doesn’t have a free plan, it offers a 7-day free trial to let you see whether this tool meets your needs.

4. Quillbot

Quillbot offers many tools for students and writers, and summarizer is one of them. With this tool, you can customize your summary length and choose between two modes: paragraph and key sentences. The former presents a summary as a coherent paragraph, while the latter gives you key ideas of the text in the form of bullet points.

What is great about Quillbot is that you can use it for free. However, there’s a limitation: you can only summarize a text of up to 1,200 words on a free plan. A premium plan extends this limit to 6,000 words. In addition, you don’t need to register to use Quillbot summarizer; just input your text and get the result.

5. TLDR This

TLDR This is a summary generator that can help you quickly summarize long text. You can paste your paper directly into the tool or provide it with a URL of the article you want to shorten.

With a free plan, you have unlimited attempts to summarize texts in the form of key sentences. TLDR This also provides advanced AI summaries, but you have only 10 of these on a free plan. To get more of them, you have to go premium, which starts at $4 per month.

6. HIX.AI

HIX.AI summarizer is an AI-powered tool that can help you summarize texts of up to 10,000 characters. If you use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, HIX.AI has a convenient extension for you.

You can use the tool for free to check 1,000 words per week. Along with this, you get access to over 120 other AI-powered tools to help you with your writing tasks. These include essay checker, essay rewriter, essay topic generator, and many others. With a premium plan, which starts at $19.99 a month billed yearly, you also get access to GPT-4 and other advanced features.

7. Scholarcy

Scholarcy is one of the best tools for summarizing academic articles. It presents summaries in the form of flashcards, which can be downloaded as Word, PowerPoint, or Markdown files.

This tool has some outstanding features for students and researchers. For example, it creates a referenced summary, which makes it easier for you to cite the information correctly in your paper. In addition, it can find the references from the summarized article and provide you with open-access links to them. The tool can also extract tables and figures from the text and let you download them as Excel files.

Unregistered users can summarize one article per day. With a free registered account, you can make 3 summary flashcards a day. Moreover, Scholarcy offers free Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions that allow you to summarize short and medium-sized articles.

8. Frase

Frase is an AI-powered summary generator that is available for free. The tool can summarize texts of up to 600-700 words. Therefore, it’s good if you want to, say, summarize the main points of your short essay or blog post to write a conclusion. However, if you need summaries of long research articles, you should choose another option.

This summary generator allows you to adjust the level of creativity, meaning that you can generate original, plagiarism-free summaries. Frase also has lots of extra features for SEO and project management, which makes it a good option for website content creators.

9. Resoomer

Resoomer is another paraphrasing and summarizing tool that works with several languages. You’re free to use the app in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

This online tool may be considered as one of the best text summarizers in IvyPanda ranking, because it allows performing many custom settings. For example, you can click to Manual and set the size of the summary (in percent or words). You can also set the number of keywords for the tool to focus on.

Among its drawbacks, we would mention that the software works only with argumentative texts and won’t reword other types correctly. Also, free version contains lots of ads and does not allow its users to import files. The premium subscription costs 4.90€ per month or 39.90€/year.

10. Summarizer

Summarizer is another good way to summarize any article you read online. This simple Chrome extension will provide you with a summary within a couple of clicks. Install the add-on, open the article or select the piece of text you want to summarize and click the button “Summarize”.

The software processes various texts in your browser, including long PDF articles. The result of summarizing has only 7% of the original article. This app is great for all who don’t want to read long publications. However, it doesn’t allow you to import file or download the result.

11. Summary Generator

The last article and essay Summary Generator in our list which can be helpful for your experience in college or university. This is free open software everyone can use.

The tool has only two buttons—one to summarize the document and the other to clear the field. With this software, you’ll get a brief summary based on your text. You don’t have to register there to get your document shortened.

Speaking about drawbacks of the website, we would mention too many ads and no options to summarize a URL or document, set up the length of the result and export it to the popular file types.

These were the best online summarizing tools to deal with the task effectively. We hope some of them became your favorite summarizers, and you’ll use them often in the future.

Not sure if a summarizer will work for your paper? Check out this short tutorial on how the text summarizing tool can come in handy for essay writing.

🤔 Techniques & Tools to Summarize without Plagiarizing

Of course, there are times when you can’t depend on online tools. For example, you may be restricted to use them in a class or maybe you have to highlight some specific paragraphs and customizing the tool’s settings would take more time and efforts than summary writing itself.

In this chapter, you’ll learn to summarize a long article, essay, research paper, report, or a book chapter with the help of helpful tips, a logical approach, and a little bit of creativity.

Here are some methods to let you create a fantastic summary.

1. Know your goal. To choose the right route to your goal, you need to understand it perfectly. Why should you summarize the text? What is its style: scientific or publicistic? Who is the author? Where was the article published? There are many significant questions that can help to adapt your text better. Develop a short interview to use during the summary writing. Include all the important information on where you need to post the text and for what purpose.
2. Thorough reading. To systemize your thoughts about the text, it’s significant to investigate it in detail. Read the text two or more times to grasp the basic ideas of the article and understand its goals and motives.
   Give yourself all the time you need to process the text. Often we need a couple of hours to extract the right results from the study or learn to paraphrase the text properly.
3. Highlight the main idea. When writing a summary, you bear a responsibility for the author. Not only you have to extract the significant idea of the text but to paraphrase it correctly. It’s important not to misrepresent any of the author’s conclusions in your summary. That’s why you should find the main idea and make sure, you can paraphrase it without a loss of meaning.
   If possible, read a couple of professional reviews of a targeted book chapter or article. It can help you to analyze the text better.
4. Mark the arguments. The process of summarizing is always easier if you have a marker to highlight important details in the text. If you don’t have a printed text, there’s always Microsoft Word to use a highlight tool on the paper.
   Try to mark all arguments, statistics, and facts in the text to represent them in your summary. This information will turn into key elements of the summary you’ll create, so keep attention on what you highlight exactly.
5. Take care of plagiarism. Before you start writing, learn what percent of originality should you aim at. Various projects have different requirements. And they determine how many efforts you should put into writing to get a perfect summary your teacher will like.
   Depending on the percent of originality, build a plan for your short text. Allow yourself copy as much information as allowed to save your time.
6. Build a structure. With the help of key elements, which you’ve highlighted in the text, it’s possible to create a powerful structure including all the interesting facts and arguments.
   Develop an outline according to a basic structure – introduction, body, and conclusion. Even if your summary is extremely short, the main idea should sound in both the first and last sentences.
7. Write a draft. If you’re not a professional writer, it can be extremely difficult to develop a text with the correct word count on the first try. We advise you to develop a general text firstly – include all the information without controlling the number of sentences.
8. Cut out the unnecessary parts. On this step, you should edit the draft and eliminate the unnecessary parts. Keep in mind, the number of sentences your summary must contain. Make sure the main point is fully represented in the text. You can cut out any sentence except those concluding the significant arguments.
9. Proofread your summary. We recommend making a thorough proofread of your summary. Here are the main aspects to check in your text:
   • Wordiness – you should delete unnecessary words, which make it difficult to understand the text
   • Common mistakes – mistakes made in academic papers are basically the same, so it’s helpful to have an article like this one when you’re proofreading
   • Appropriate terminology – for each topic, there’s a list of the terminology you can use
   • Facts and statistics – you can accidently write a wrong year or percent, make sure to avoid these mistakes
   • Quotes – every quote should be written correctly and have a link to its source.
   Want more tips on proofreading?
   Then, read the following chapter! We’ve collected a couple of tips to help you with academic editing.

📝 How to Proofread the Summarized Text?

Now, when you know how to summarize an article, it’s time to edit your text whether it’s your own writing or a summary generator’s results.

In this chapter, you’ll see the basic ways to proofread any type of text: academic paper (essay, research paper, etc.), article, letter, book’s chapter, and so on.

1. Proofread your summary. Are there times when you can’t remember an appropriate synonym? Then you should use Thesaurus and analogous services from time to time.
   They can expand your vocabulary a lot and help to find the right words even in the most challenging situations.
2. Pay attention to easily confused words. It’s especially significant if you edit a nonfiction text – there’s a number of words people often confuse without even realizing. English Oxford Living Dictionaries have a list of these word pairs so you won’t miss any.
3. Proofread one type of mistakes at a time. To edit a paper properly don’t split your attention to grammar and punctuation—this way you can miss dozens of mistakes. To get more accurate results, read the first time to edit the style, the second to eliminate grammar mistakes, and the third to proofread punctuation. Take as many times as you need to concentrate on each type.
4. Take a rest from your paper. If you use an online summarizing tool, you can skip this step. But if you’ve been writing a paper for several hours and now trying to edit it without taking a break, it may be a bad idea. Why? Because without a fresh pair of eyes there’s a great possibility not to spot even obvious mistakes.
   Give yourself some time to slightly forget the text—go for a walk or call a friend, and then return to work as a new person.
5. Hire a proofreader. If you need to get perfect results, think about hiring a professional. Skills and qualification, which they have, guarantee a perfect text without any mistakes or style issues. Once you find a proofreader, you can optimize your work perfectly.
   Search for specialists on freelance websites like UpWork — it’s comfortable and safe to use. Of course, there’s one flaw you should think about—hiring a pro is expensive. So, everyone should decide on their own whether they need to spend this money or not.
6. Switch your paper with a friend. If you can’t afford a professional editor, there’s a less expensive option—ask a friend to look through your paper and proofread theirs in return.
   Make sure, you both make manual editing, not just check it with Microsoft Office or analogous software. Although there are great grammar tools, they still can’t spot many mistakes obvious to a human.
7. Use grammar checking tools. We recommend you not to depend on multiple grammar tools. But the assistance it can offer is irreplaceable. Start your proofreading by scanning your text with Grammarly or an analogous tool.
   The service detects many types of errors including confusing words’ pairs, punctuation, misspellings, wordiness, incorrect word order, unfinished sentences, and so on.
   Of course, you should never correct the mistakes without thinking on every specific issue. Tools not only miss a lot of mistakes but they also can be wrong about your errors.
8. Read aloud. It’s amazing how different the written text can sound when read aloud. If you practice this proofreading method, you know that many mistakes can be spotted if you actually pronounce the text.
   Why does it happen? People understand information better if they perceive it with the help of different senses. You can use this trick even in learning— memorize the materials with the help of reading, listening, and speaking.

These tips are developed to help students proofread their papers easily. We hope this chapter and the post itself create a helpful guide on how to summarize an article.

Here you found the best summarizing tools, which are accessible online and completely free, and learned to summarize various texts and articles on your own.

⭐ Best Summarizing Tool: the Benefits

Updated: Oct 11th, 2024

🔗 References

1. Summarizing: Academic Integrity at MIT
2. 4 of the Best Online Summarizer Tools to Shorten Text: maketecheasier
3. Summarizing: University of Toronto
4. 5 Easy Summarizing Strategies for Students: ThoughtCo.
5. Summarizing: Texas A&M University Writing Center
6. Comparative Study of Text Summarization Methods: Semantic Scholar
7. How to Write a Summary: UTEP
8. How to Write a Summary: UW