Know Your Audience: The benefits and pitfalls of generating plain language summaries beyond the "general" audience

Abstract

Figure 1: Simpler summaries were often the best reading experience for participants with little to no background in a scientific topic. However, readers with high topic familiarity, even those considered part of the general public (i.e., not a researcher), ignored more information in low complexity summaries while still reporting these simple summaries as equally engaging as high complexity ones. Our results provide guidance on generating plain language summaries for a wider range of general audiences.