4c. Synthesise

4c. Synthesise#

Introduction#

You have read and summarized your articles. You have found relevant information linking to your information search questions. Now it is up to you to decide: what information is relevant for my research, what information is helping me to answer my questions? And what will the answer be? To help you do this, a synthesis is an important tool.

‘Synthesis’ means ‘the putting together of parts or elements to form a whole’. When synthesing you take relevant ideas from the sources you read and summarised, and combine these ideas with existing knowledge to create new knowledge, connected to your information search questions (Tilburg University, n.d.).

Summarising vs synthesising#

While close reading, notetaking and summarising typically deal with one resource at a time, synthesis is about linking information from different resources to create a new, (your!) coherent understanding of a topic. The key question in a synthesis is often: how do the resources you found and read relate to one another, in your interpretation and what variety of answers have you found for your information search questions?

Watch the video below to learn more about the process of synthesising:


“Research Synthesis” by USU Libraries is licensed CC-BY-NC

Step 1

Organise Your Findings
Link to your initial notes and summaries to organise your main findings

Step 2

Decide What Lens to Focus on
Pick an organising category like methods or important discussions

Step 3

Compare Sources
Compare the findings in your selected sources

Step 1: Organise your Findings#

Based on your observations and your information search questions, group your sources in a way that makes sense for the question you want to answer or the argument you want to make. If findings during your synthesis undermine your research/design approach or findings, be a true researcher and objectively identify/describe this.

Some questions to ask yourself while you are comparing sources:

  • How do research questions from different authors relate? Do they differ, diverge, overlap, build upon each other?

  • Do authors build upon earlier conclusions of other authors/resources? Or completely approach it from another angle?

  • Where do authors use similar methods, or very different methods? Why?

  • Do authors find similar data/results, or different results?

  • Do authors arrive at similar conclusions, or strongly different?

  • What major themes or concepts keep coming up in the literature I am reading?

  • What are strengths and weaknesses of my sources?

  • Are there knowledge gaps being discussed? (USU Libraries, 2019)

THESIS SUPERVISOR

Once you have an initial overview of your findings, this is a great time to share them with your supervisor, they can help you refine your arguments.

Step 2: Decide What Lens to Focus on#

When grouping your sources, you integrate the different sources to tell your perspective on the literature you found. Rather than a summary, this is where you combine the sources to create, for example, a new overview of the literature on a topic (introduction or literature review), or combine the main findings in the sources with your own results to discuss your findings (discussion).

What lens to focus on is related to your information search question. As you go comparing your sources and adding your own voice, decide what the important themes and answers you need from the literature are. Some examples of how you can group your sources you can find below:

Focus on Your Information Search Questions!

Tip: It’s easy to struggle with the scope of your synthesis activities. Keep the end goal of your project/product in mind – focus primarily on the synthesis around your information search questions.

If your focus is for example on developing or evaluating a specific method, you could organise your synthesis by methods. You could look at data, equations or models from the sources in your literature review, potentially replot graphs connected to proposed solutions or merge data found by different sources and analyse their findings, connecting them to your own ideas or building your own methodology.

To support these types of syntheses, you might want to look into graph digitization tools like Engauge, which extract data from graphs.

When your goal is, for example, to analyse the different discussions going on between scholars, you could use a thematic grouping of sources (College of Arts and Sciences, n.d.). This is often a helpful way of discussing sources when you are writing the introduction of your project. When you synthesise thematically, you make an argument connected to the themes you have found within the research. For example when you are writing your literature review, it is common to highlight the themes that are playing an important role in a research field. You could for example argue that there are 3 main themes currently addressed around your topic, and continue with a discussion of each of the three themes, presenting sources related to each topic. For each theme, add your own ideas or results to the theme discussed to add to the scholarly conversation.

Point-of-view can be a helpful format to build a synthesis around when you find many differences between scholars (College of Arts and Sciences, n.d.). You could start your discussion by contrasting and comparing different opinions that come forward in the sources you have selected and add your view on which arguments and evidence is more compelling. In addition, you could connect these opinions to the outcomes of your own research if relevant.

These groupings can help you identify the main ideas within the literature and how they have developed over time (College of Arts and Sciences, n.d.). However, rather than providing a timeline of all events surrounding a topic, you should keep your analysis of the sources critical. This means critically reflecting on the different sources which came out around the same time, synthesising them to tell a story of the development of the field and placing your own research within this context. Is your research new? Or is it part of a longer tradition?

Step 3: Compare Sources in Detail#

After deciding what way you want to group and compare your sources, and what specific topics you are going to look for in the literature, you can start comparing the information in your sources. Note that as you go about synthesising your sources and answering your questions, you should also critically evaluate your sources and pay attention to their strengths and weaknesses. Which ones provide more compelling evidence?

Use a Synthesis Matrix

A synthesis matrix can be a helpful tool to approach the synthesis (Bernhardt, n.d.) . In a synthesis matrix you list the sources you have selected for your project and compare their findings on topics you have selected. You download can here an example Synthesis Matrix Format

Practice#

As explained, a synthesis is more than a summary of sources. In a synthesis you add your own thoughts and critical analysis. Unsure about the difference between a synthesis and a summary? Practice with the scenarios below and see if you recognise the differences and understand the different ways you can organise your information while synthesising.

References#