Think back to high school or college when you were assigned summer reading. Maybe, out of desperation, you turned to CliffsNotes or SparkNotes. Those tools could tell you what happened—but they couldn’t tell you why it mattered. Only by reading, analyzing, and writing about the material could you truly engage with the themes, draw comparisons, and develop your own critique.
HeinOnline’s new Article Summaries (Powered by AI) work in much the same way. They’re not a shortcut to replace research; they’re a starting point to help you engage more deeply.
Why We Built Article Summaries
In today’s world, legal scholarship is vast. Our Law Journal Library alone contains more than two million articles. For researchers, students, and professionals, this sheer volume can make it challenging to quickly identify the most relevant articles.
That’s where Article Summaries come in. Created by HeinOnline’s internal AI team and trained exclusively on our own datasets, these concise 200-300-word overviews help you:
- Grasp the central thesis of an article at a glance
- Identify the key issues, methods, and findings
- Quickly determine whether an article is worth a deeper read
Just like those summer reading guides, summaries give you the lay of the land, but the real insight still comes from digging into the full text.
Trust and Transparency
We know “AI” can raise eyebrows, especially in research environments where accuracy, privacy, and reliability are paramount. That is why we built Article Summaries with transparency at their core. Unlike many AI tools, they are not powered by third-party APIs or information pulled from the open internet. They are created entirely in-house, generated solely from HeinOnline’s own internal datasets. Because the process takes place on infrastructure we own and operate, no user data is ever collected, transmitted, or stored.
Just as important, Article Summaries are not interactive. They are not a chatbot or an open-ended tool, but rather pre-generated overviews designed to provide a quick snapshot of an article. To ensure clarity, each summary is labeled with a date stamp, a note that it was generated by AI, and a feedback option so users can flag concerns or inaccuracies. Our AI team reviews all submissions carefully and uses them to improve accuracy and refine the process.
Building trust, however, means more than careful design. It also requires rigorous testing. To that end, we implemented several quality control measures before release. Our support and publications teams conducted extensive internal testing, evaluating the summaries against our editorial standards. We also organized a focus group of authors and librarians, many of whom reviewed summaries of their own published work and provided detailed feedback. Their insights helped us refine and validate the process, ensuring that the summaries are not only accurate but also valuable to the researchers who rely on them.
Where You’ll Find Article Summaries
Because the Law Journal Library is so large, Article Summaries are being rolled out in batches, beginning with the most-cited and most-accessed articles first. You can spot them in three different places.
1. Search Results
By default, summaries display within your search results. Toggle to switch between summaries and matching text pages.
Click Read More to expand and view the full summary.
2. Document Viewer
When viewing an article in the document viewer, select the AI Summary icon in the image toolbar. The summary will open in a panel for quick reading.
3. PDF Download
When downloading an article PDF, the summary with automatically appear on the second page, right after the citation page.
PRO TIP: Need to copy the summary? Select the copy function in the upper right-hand corner for quick sharing.
Enhancing, Not Replacing, Research
At HeinOnline, we believe technology should support the work of researchers, not replace it. Article Summaries are here to help you get your bearings, filter through noise, and dive more confidently into the sources that matter most.
After all, just like those old study guides, a summary can point you in the right direction. But the real value, the analysis, the discovery, and the scholarship will always come from you.
