Synthesizing Sources

While analysis usually considers one text at a time, synthesis considers multiple, related texts. Rather than looking at one text’s purpose, construction, and contents, you look at several texts’ purposes, construction, and contents. What do these texts say about their shared topic? Where do they agree and disagree? Do they neglect or omit a perspective or idea?

For many writers, synthesis can seem daunting or overwhelming—after all, the sources are hard enough to read alone, let alone in conversation with one another. Keep in mind, though, that we do this without really trying in our daily lives. Any time you’re considering multiple points of view at once, you’re thinking synthetically. 

This might seem like overkill for a pretty simple situation like this, but it demonstrates a strategy that can be very effective with more complex sets of arguments.

Let’s imagine that, inspired by your trip to the food carts with Angela, Jona, and Lanora, you decide to write a paper about this new micro-restaurant phenomenon. Your preliminary research question is: “Is opening a food cart a real opportunity or a false hope for entrepreneurs starting out in the restaurant industry?”

You can list trends (ideas that are repeated or shared) and gaps (ideas about which sources seem to differ or conflict, or which are simply not addressed) in the left hand column. Then, you can list paraphrases or direct quotations from the sources in the following columns; this will enable you to “see” where these sources overlap or differ. (Be careful to use quotation marks correctly in your matrix; if you are directly quoting from the source, leave yourself those clues that the material should be paraphrased later when you incorporate the ideas into your Literature Review.)

It is important to remember that a trend does not exist unless two or more sources support it. Also, a gap cannot exist unless two or more sources disagree, report conflicting data, or fail to address a particular idea. For this reason, each body paragraph needs to represent one trend or gap in your research, and contain evidence from two or more sources to demonstrate that this trend or gap exists.

From this synthesis matrix, we can see that all three sources address the question of economic prospects, though here we also see a gap—or at least a different area of focus—in the coverage. One article (Kapell et al.) discusses the fact that food cart owners rarely make the jump from a mobile restaurant to a more stable storefront. The other two articles just emphasize the lower start-up cost of food carts. This could be an interesting area to do more research: do food cart owners intend (and fail) to switch to brick-and-mortar storefronts? Or is the cart an end unto itself? From this example, we can see how a synthesis matrix allows us to see gaps and trends in a group of sources.

Adapted from "Combining Ideas (Synthesis)" by Lumen Learning, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).