Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-09
Summarize a paper without quietly smoothing over the limitations it reported on itself
Produces a paper summary that keeps the authors' own stated caveats and sample limitations intact, rather than compressing a hedged finding into a confident one-line takeaway.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Summarize the paper below for someone who needs to decide whether to act on its finding, not just know what it says in the abstract. PAPER OR ABSTRACT TEXT A pasted abstract and discussion section from a study on remote-work productivity self-reports across 24 tech company employees. WHO THIS SUMMARY IS FOR A non-technical VP of People who doesn't read primary research regularly and will likely act on the headline takeaway. DECISION THIS MIGHT INFORM Whether to cite this study in a company-wide memo justifying a permanent remote-work policy. RULES Preserve the authors' own stated limitations, sample size, and scope caveats in the summary itself — do not compress "in a sample of 24 undergraduate participants, we observed a moderate effect" into "the study found that X works," because the second version is a stronger claim than the paper actually supports and would mislead A non-technical VP of People who doesn't read primary research regularly and will likely act on the headline takeaway. about how much weight to put on it. If the paper's own discussion or limitations section flags a specific weakness (small sample, non-representative population, correlational rather than causal design, funding source), name that weakness in the summary rather than only in a separate "limitations" footnote most readers skip. Distinguish clearly between what the paper found and what the paper's authors speculate about in their discussion section — speculation dressed as a finding is a common way summaries overstate a paper's actual evidence. WHAT NOT TO DO Do not add a confidence level or practical recommendation the paper itself doesn't support, even if Whether to cite this study in a company-wide memo justifying a permanent remote-work policy. would benefit from a clean answer — say plainly if the paper is too limited in scope to actually inform that decision. OUTPUT FORMAT 1. One-sentence plain-language statement of what was studied and found. 2. The specific finding, with sample size and study design named. 3. The authors' own stated limitations, verbatim or closely paraphrased. 4. A one-line verdict on whether this paper alone is strong enough evidence to act on Whether to cite this study in a company-wide memo justifying a permanent remote-work policy., or whether it's one data point among several needed.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Summarization inherently compresses, and the easiest compression a model can produce is one that drops qualifiers — "a moderate effect was observed in a small non-representative sample" loses its hedges far more readily than it loses its subject and verb, because hedges are exactly the words a shorter sentence sacrifices first. That default produces summaries that are technically about the right topic but overstate the paper's actual evidentiary weight, which matters enormously when the summary's reader — often someone who will never open the original paper — treats the compressed version as the full claim. Explicitly instructing the model to preserve sample size, design, and the authors' own limitations forces those details to survive the compression pass rather than being the first casualties of it. The instruction to separate finding from discussion-section speculation addresses a specific structural feature of academic papers: authors routinely speculate more broadly in the discussion than their actual data supports, because that's where a paper is allowed to gesture at implications, and a summary that draws from the discussion section as if it were the results section imports that broader, less-supported claim without flagging that it's speculation rather than evidence. Naming the intended use and asking for an explicit verdict on whether the paper alone can support it prevents the summary from silently doing the reader's decision-making for them by implication — it forces the gap between what was found and what someone wants to do with it into the open instead of leaving it to be assumed.
What you get back
What was studied: self-reported productivity among 24 remote tech employees over 8 weeks. Finding: participants reported feeling moderately more productive, but the study used self-report only, no objective output measure, and the sample was small and drawn from a single company. Authors' own caveat: they explicitly note the finding may not generalize beyond tech-sector knowledge work. Verdict: too limited alone to anchor a company-wide policy memo — useful as one supporting data point, not a standalone justification.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-09
Changelog
- 2026-08-09 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE WHAT SCULT BUILDS
