Summary Nouns

A summary noun is one word that makes a general point about the more specific details of your research, or findings. It also creates a link between what you have said, or are going to say by summarising a previously mentioned action or idea. It may also express a key point helping you to understand the details of the text and how they are connected. It can be used in both the singular and the plural but generally in the singular. Below is a list of the most commonly used in academic writing.

application approach aspect category challenge change
characteristic circumstance class development difficulty event
experience facet fact factor feature form
Issue item manner method phase possibility
process purpose reason result stage subject
system task tendency topic trend type

Summary nouns appear to be more functional than meaningful as they add cohesion to the text. However, they also give you an idea of what the author is thinking or their stance. Look at the examples in bold below.

Example 1

As climate change continues to alter local weather patterns, it is important to understand how people are experiencing such changes because personal experience may affect mitigation and adaptation policy preferences and behaviors. Local weather conditions are also an easily accessible source of information that, aggregated over time, may enable people to detect long-term climate trends and update their beliefs about global warming. However, motivated reasoning—the tendency to fit information to conclusions that correspond with a preexisting belief—may limit the accuracy of local weather perceptions. This paper focuses on perceptions of seasonal weather in Norway and examines evidence for motivated reasoning consistent with pre-existing beliefs about climate change, using a national panel survey combined with high-resolution seasonal climate observations. Respondents’ perceptions are sensitive to observed differences in both temperature and precipitation, but respondents are more likely to accurately perceive local precipitation than local temperature. Controlling for observed conditions, beliefs about global climate change had a large effect on perceptions of seasonal temperature, and smaller effects on perceptions of seasonal precipitation. These findings provide evidence that individual perceptions of seasonal weather are related to local conditions, but they are also likely to be motivated by beliefs about global climate change.

Howe, P.D., 2018. Perceptions of seasonal weather are linked to beliefs about global climate change: evidence from Norway. Climatic Change, 148(4), pp.467-480.

The summary nouns do not give specific information about the content, but they do tell us something about the focus of the study, people's beliefs and perceptions regarding local weather changes.

Example 2

Many relevant search problems, from artificial intelligence to combinatorics, explore large search spaces to determine the presence or absence of a certain object. These problems are hard due to combinatorial explosion and have traditionally been called infeasible. The brute force method, which at least implicitly explores all possibilities, is a general approach to systematically search through such spaces.

Brute force has long been regarded as suitable only for simple problems. This has changed in the last two decades, due to the progress in satisfiability (SAT) solving, which by adding brute reason renders brute force into a powerful approach to deal with many problems easily and automatically. Search spaces with far more possibilities than the number of particles in the universe may be completely explored, using sophisticated algorithms, implementations guided by powerful heuristics, and parallel computing.

SAT solving determines whether a formula in propositional logic has a solution, and its brute reasoning acts in a blind and uninformed way — as a feature, not a bug. It has emerged as a disruptive technology, facilitating efficient methods for many industrial applications and as the core search engine in tools such as theorem provers. We focus on applying SAT to mathematics, as a systematic development of the traditional method of proof by exhaustion.

Kullmann, O., 2017. The science of brute force. Communications of the ACM, 60(8), p.70.

Here the author is aware that there are problems in his area of research, but also wishes to highlight the fact that there are possibilities, but they may require a different approach. This approach requires certain methods and applications to enable the development of their field of study.

The next example is more complex as the summary nouns used are less common and carry depth of meaning. This could be because of the topic, criminal profiling, that the text discusses.

*It is important to make a note of summary nouns specific to your discipline.

Example 3

The scholarly literature over the past decade has chronicled a growing problem in the forensic technique colloquially called criminal profiling. The basis of this conundrum appears to originate from a concept referred to as “offender homology,” which presumes an inherent uniformity among offenders that is believed to underpin the analytic process incumbent to criminal profiling. Studies thus far conducted have apparently struggled to find evidence of offender homology and based upon these findings arguments have been promulgated that various approaches to criminal profiling imputably labeled as “trait-based” are therefore not viable. Indirectly contradicting these arguments, however, have been studies testing profiler accuracy that have found evidence of individuals who appear to use trait-based methods but can nonetheless proficiently predict the characteristics of unknown offenders. Against this backdrop, the present article examines a number of tenets and disjunctions that appear to have arisen from research into offender homology and imputed to the practices of so-called trait-based profiling. The notion of whether trait-based profiling is, in fact, representative of profiling methods is examined, and an integrative hypothesis proposed that attempts to resolve the quandary between offender homology and profiler accuracy.

Kocsis, R.N. and Palermo, G.B., 2015. Disentangling criminal profiling: Accuracy, homology, and the myth of trait-based profiling. International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology, 59(3), pp.313-332.

The summary nouns used here suggest that the topic has problems that are difficult to solve. The following words,

this conundrum

these arguments

disjunctions

the quandary

suggest that the difficulties faced with criminal profiling are not resolved and that there is a problem that requires a solution. The use of summary nouns here also help to create the writer’s stance, or opinion.

Practice

Now it's time to focus your activity on texts that you may need to read and understand for your own discipline. Nowadays academic papers from relevant, peer-reviewed, academic journals are the main resource for research for your assignments. You can use your institution's database which will give you access to a wealth of resources, or if you are not enrolled in an institution, you can use Google Scholar which will give you abstracts for numerous texts on all academic disciplines.

Using an abstract or the introduction from an academic paper in your own discipline, skim the text to get the main idea, then underline any summary nouns the writer has included.

What are the key points that they refer to?
What is the idea that connects them?
Are they connecting or summarising previous mentioned ideas.
Are they adding meaning to the text?
Are they indicating the writer's stance and, if so, what is that stance/opinion?

Now write a summary of the text you have read using the summary nouns to help you organise it.