Scientific abstracts and plain language summaries in psychology: A comparison based on readability indices

Abstract

Findings from psychological research are usually difficult to interpret for non-experts. Yet, non-experts resort to psychological findings to inform their decisions (e.g., whether to seek a psychotherapeutic treatment or not). Thus, the communication of psychological research to non-expert audiences has received increasing attention over the last years. Plain language summaries (PLS) are abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles that aim to explain the rationale, methods, findings, and interpretation of a scientific study to non-expert audiences using non-technical language. Unlike media articles or other forms of accessible research summaries, PLS are usually written by the authors of the respective journal article, ensuring that research content is accurately reproduced. In this study, we compared the readability of PLS and corresponding scientific abstracts in a sample of 103 journal articles from two psychological peer-reviewed journals. To assess readability, we calculated four readability indices that quantify text characteristics related to reading comprehension (e.g., word difficulty, sentence length). Analyses of variance revealed that PLS were easier to read than scientific abstracts. This effect emerged in both included journals and across all readability indices. There was only little evidence that this effect differed in magnitude between the included journals. In sum, this study shows that PLS may be an effective instrument for communicating psychological research to non-expert audiences. We discuss future research avenues to increase the quality of PLS and strengthen their role in science communication.

Straight From the Scientist’s Mouth—Plain Language Summaries Promote Laypeople’s Comprehension and Knowledge Acquisition When Reading About Individual Research Findings in Psychology

“…Potential target groups of plain language summaries in psychology and the social sciences in general include interested laypersons, practicing psychologists, (science) journalists, and students. A recent study based on readability indices (i.e., indices that quantify readability based on text characteristics such as word difficulty or sentence length) revealed better readability of plain language summaries compared to scientific abstracts of psychological journal articles (Stricker et al, 2020). However, this study assessed neither laypersons' actual perceived text comprehensibility nor their actual knowledge acquisition.…”

Plain language summaries: A systematic review of theory, guidelines and empirical research

“…In their empirical studies, researchers investigated the readability of PLSs [ 6 , 13 , 15 , 21 , 22 , 28 , 43 – 48 ], participants’ enjoyment or preference of PLSs in general [ 10 , 11 , 39 , 49 ], participants’ satisfaction with text length [ 13 , 22 , 42 ] or participants’ judgment regarding the usability of the PLS [ 3 , 12 , 23 , 28 , 50 , 51 ]. To measure these outcomes, researchers, for example, computed readability indices, such as the Flesch reading ease score [ 13 , 44 , 43 , 47 , 48 ], or participants were asked whether information was easy to find in the PLS [ 50 ].…”

“…Ten other empirical articles investigated the format of a PLS in general by comparing participants’ responses after having read a PLS to (the same or other) participants’ responses after having read another type of scientific text summary. PLSs were compared to scientific abstracts [ 6 , 44 , 47 , 49 , 53 ], infographics [ 49 ] or graphical abstracts [ 39 ], blog posts [ 50 , 97 ], blogshots [ 11 ], podcasts [ 53 ], transcribed podcasts [ 53 ], Wikipedia articles [ 50 ], video abstracts [ 39 ], press releases [ 44 ], newspaper health articles [ 48 ] and systematic reviews with and without summary of findings tables [ 46 ]. There were statistically significant indications for the superiority of blogshots over both PLSs and Wikipedia articles in terms of ease of use, user preference and aesthetical judgment [ 50 ]; of videos and PLSs over graphical abstracts and scientific abstracts in terms of comprehension, a feeling of understanding and a feeling of enjoyment [ 39 ]; of PLSs over systematic reviews with and without summary of findings tables in terms of clarity and accessibility of information [ 46 ]; of infographics over PLSs in terms of reading experience and user-friendliness, but not of knowledge [ 49 ]; and of newspaper articles over PLSs in terms of readability [ 48 ].…”

Assessing the Readability of Policy Documents on the Digital Single Market of the European Union

“…For instance, local newspapers in the United States have been observed to attain values around 12 at maximum [38]. Another comparative example would be abstracts in psychology papers for which values around 17 have been reported [39]. Finally, the visualization in Fig.…”