**7. Conclusions**

Breakthrough knowledge has been shown to occur most often when prior knowledge is mixed with current knowledge. The art of discovering breakthrough knowledge in the age of Google involves writing web-based syntheses using interactive tools like online search engines and online databases. Synthesis writing is an important educational objective. Grounded theory is a useful synthesis method to select, organize, analyze, and combine concepts from a mixture of research findings to infer an explanatory theory. Having domain-specific knowledge is important for synthesizing new knowledge and for identifying potential confounding factors, effect modifiers, and mediators when inferring a causal theory. I provided several examples of knowledge syntheses from my own published web-based syntheses in epidemiology, demonstrating how this novel method is readily available for use by researchers in other fields.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.
