  Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the years and is
used in numerous applications, impacting the lives of many. Despite this
development, there is little research that meaningfully investigates how the
current research focus in automatic summarization aligns with users' needs. To
bridge this gap, we propose a survey methodology that can be used to
investigate the needs of users of automatically generated summaries.
Importantly, these needs are dependent on the target group. Hence, we design
our survey in such a way that it can be easily adjusted to investigate
different user groups. In this work we focus on university students, who make
extensive use of summaries during their studies. We find that the current
research directions of the automatic summarization community do not fully align
with students' needs. Motivated by our findings, we present ways to mitigate
this mismatch in future research on automatic summarization: we propose
research directions that impact the design, the development and the evaluation
of automatically generated summaries.
