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How to use ChatGPT to summarize a book, article, or research paper
Sometimes it can be hard to get all your reading done, especially with ADHD diagnoses on the rise. If you’re tasked with a school or work project and you’re pressed for time (or focus), artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT can help summarize long articles, research papers, and books to make them a bit more accessible.
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ChatGPT has come a long way from its launch in 2022, especially since it got web browsing last spring. However, all AI chatbots can make mistakes — don’t rely entirely on ChatGPT’s summary for your understanding of a text. Though ChatGPT now provides citations, they aren’t always correct. Plus, an AI system won’t interpret more abstract concepts or literature the way a human mind can, meaning it won’t necessarily capture certain themes or details.
Think of ChatGPT as a tool that can help make a dense text more approachable. If you’re using it to help with other parts of your work, such as writing, tread carefully — considering the plagiarism and copyright issues surrounding these tools, it isn’t in your best interest to have chatbots write your work for you.
If you’re a student writing a research paper, someone who is keen to discover more about a lengthy article, or want to dive into a complicated subject, you can use ChatGPT to simplify the process.
How to create summaries with ChatGPT
What you’ll need: A device that can connect to the internet, a free (or paid) OpenAI account, and a basic understanding of the article, research paper, or book you want to summarize.
The process should take about one to three minutes.
If you need ChatGPT to help summarize an article or research paper, find the body of text online and keep it open in a separate tab. You can also try just giving ChatGPT the book title and author by inputting it into the text box.
In the chat box, type in “Summarize [book title].” For example, “Summarize Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman,” or “Summarize this article: [URL].”
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Now that ChatGPT can provide sources for the info it surfaces, you can also ask for clarifying background information on a topic. For example, if you’re writing about cognition, you can prompt ChatGPT to “Explain how personal experiences impact cognition and provide citations.”
ChatGPT will respond with several bullet points and citations, giving you a framework for your larger topic area and additional sources to dive into if you choose.
In my case, those citations were papers and books that weren’t linked — I verified the titles were real by Googling each one. If you want to skip that step, simply ask ChatGPT to “provide citations with links,” and you’ll only get sources you can click on to verify yourself.
If you’re having trouble comprehending specific passages in an article, book, or research paper, you can copy parts of the text and paste them into ChatGPT, or even upload a photo.
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Think of this method as reshuffling the words you’re currently reading to help you make more sense of the text in front of you.
This is an accurate summary of Let The Misunderstand, an essay by Moeko Fujii that I have read before.
Screenshot by Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET
Review ChatGPT’s responses to ensure they’re correct within your understanding. For one of my queries, ChatGPT did not catch that an article was an excerpt of a novel, responding instead that it was the novel itself.
“‘The Witches of El Paso’ is a novel by Luis Jaramillo, published on December 11, 2024,” ChatGPT told me. The novel was published on Oct. 8, and the excerpt was published in the Public Seminar on Dec. 11, but ChatGPT mistakenly noted that date as the novel’s publication date despite citing the article itself.
ChatGPT has a track record of fabricating sources. Once you’ve reviewed the chatbot’s responses, be sure to check the sources it provides. Search titles of papers or books to verify they’re real, and click on linked articles if ChatGPT provided them. For one of the non-linked book titles ChatGPT offered me, the chatbot listed the book’s publication year as 2009, but I was only able to find editions going back to 2012.
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While the other details were correct, this is a good reminder that ChatGPT does make mistakes, or at the very least doesn’t always offer transparency into how it finds sources.
ChatGPT did not catch that this article was an excerpt of a novel, not the novel itself. The novel was published on Oct. 8, and the excerpt was published in Public Seminar on Dec. 11, but ChatGPT mistakenly noted that date as the novel’s publish date.
Screenshot by Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET
What are ChatGPT’s limitations?
If you’re using ChatGPT to summarize an article, book, or piece of research, keep in mind that ChatGPT can still hallucinate information. Always check its outputs.
Also: 8 ways to reduce ChatGPT hallucinations
ChatGPT is a large language model that uses queues and millions of data points to mimic human responses. This form of mimicry is why ChatGPT will answer questions even when it doesn’t output the correct answer. Make sure you’re not using any information from ChatGPT without fact-checking it.
Can ChatGPT summarize a PDF?
Now that ChatGPT can ingest file uploads in both the free and paid versions, you can upload a PDF and ask ChatGPT to summarize it. The chatbot correctly summarized a press release I uploaded, formatting the key points of a tech company’s release — though it was only two pages long.
Also: Don’t trust ChatGPT Search and definitely verify anything it tells you
You can also try ChatPDF for free, especially for much longer documents. You can summarize two PDFs of up to 120 pages per day, and a plan is available for $5 per month.
Can ChatGPT summarize an email thread?
Sort of. If you want to copy and paste every single email, ChatGPT can summarize the thread’s contents for you — but I wouldn’t recommend that in terms of security. Emails can contain sensitive information, like confidential work information or personal identifiers, that you can’t guarantee will be safe if uploaded to OpenAI.
It would be more helpful to scan an email thread yourself and ask ChatGPT to help you write a response based on the key points you know about the conversation.
