Slide 1: Hello everyone. My name is Juliana, and I am a third-year honors life sciences student at McMaster University located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Today, I am pleased to present to you my topic on Health in Bite Sized Pieces – Discovering Lack of Accessibility and Engagement in Lay Summaries for the first STEMcognito scicomm challenge. This project was completed under the supervision of Dr. Katie Moisse and guidance of Zoya Adeel. So let’s get into it.
Slide 2: Picture this: you’re a patient diagnosed for a rare disease and you want a trustworthy source to discover more about your health. So you find a 20 page research paper that you can barely understand. This is where lay summaries come into play. Lay summaries are a series of short paragraphs that are generally 250-300 words, and they summarize all the parts of a research manuscript, including the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion in a way that is accessible for anyone to comprehend regardless of scientific background. It is important to keep in mind that lay summaries are never about “dumbing it down” but rather combining professionalism, accessibility, and engagement all into one. Accessibility refers to the ease that one can comprehend text as well as the amount of jargon present. Jargon is defined as special words which are used by experts in a given field, where the more jargon reduces the accessibility. The term gastric ulcer is an example of jargon.
Engagement on the other hand, refers to how the writer interacts and keeps the audience interested. Now lay summaries are especially helpful for patients who wish to know more about their health. Patient access to health research, facilitated through lay summaries is the primary source of information that can aid them in being informed and managing their health. Not only this, but lay summaries are also useful for journalists, non-experts in a given field, and the general public. Notably, when authors write lay summaries to accompany their research, their papers gain more attention from the public. When a research manuscript does not contain a lay summary or if the lay summary contains an overload of jargon, grammatical mistakes, poor sentence structure, or inaccurate summarizations, there can be misinterpretation when journalists or the public attempt to translate a study. Since there is not one specific set of guidelines when writing lay summaries, there is limited quality control on what can be published.
Slide 3: Now let’s talk about the research question and hypothesis. The research question for this study was, “How accessible and engaging are lay summaries in the field of medicine?”. And I hypothesized that lay summaries are not language accessible for the public and many will not match the standards for proper lay summaries.
Slide 4: Now in terms of the methods, for this study, I collected a total of 20 lay summaries. 5 lay summaries from each of the 4 journals. These journals included Elife, Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders Journal (MSRD), Epilepsy and Behavior Case Reports (EBCR), and the Journal of Hepatology. One grader graded each lay summary based on a customized rubric created by Dr. Katie Moisse. This rubric has 4 sections, each section out of 5 marks. So the whole lay summary would be out of 20 marks in total.
Section 1 graded for accuracy of methods, results and conclusions while section 2 tested for the accuracy of the rationale, implications, and limitations. Section 3 tested for sentence structure, grammar and organization and finally, section 4 tested for engagement and accessibility.
After the grading process, and when necessary, I noted some additional comments for each lay summary. Finally, after all the data was collected, scores were tabulated for each score of the rubric and overall. Results were then graphed in Microsoft Excel.
Slide 5: So the main findings of this study include the fact that Elife had the highest overall average total score followed by MSRD, EBCR and finally, Journal of Hepatology with the lowest overall score. Specifically, the average overall score for Elife was significantly higher by about 5 marks than EBCR and about 7 marks higher than the Journal of Hepatology, which was also statistically significant.
Now, if we zoom onto section 4 of the rubric, which grades based on accessibility and engagement, we find that the average score for all journals was 1.35 out of 5. Notably, Elife’s and MSRD’s average score for section 4 of the rubric was higher which was sitting at 1.5 out of 5. The average scores for EBCR, and the Journal of Hepatology were 1.4 out of 5 and 1 out of 5 respectively.
Slide 6: From the findings, it appears that Elife lay summaries had statistically significant better overall scores than EBCR and Journal of Hepatology lay summaries. Now you’re probably thinking but why Elife? Why are Elife’s scores so high? And this is because Elife hires staff who are trained to follow the guidelines for proper science communication in order to create lay summaries based on these author submissions.
Similarly, a study done by Kirkpatrick et al. (2017) found that lay summaries that were edited by editors with a background in writing and science had statistically significantly higher levels of accessibility. From our study, since the Journal of Hepatology had the lowest overall score, and lowest score in section 4 of the rubric, there is poor accuracy, sentence structure/grammar, and poor accessibility and engagement. Engagement is such a crucial aspect, because when absent, the reader does not feel compelled to continue to read, and knowledge retention becomes limited. The results from this study can provide awareness to authors who may consider writing proper lay summaries. This may also be a turning point for journals to instill a system or quality control policy to ensure that the lay summaries published are within the standards that the journal has in place.
A limitation of this study is that only 20 lay summaries were analyzed, hence, it makes it difficult to generalize these results to all lay summaries. A future study could evaluate how patients understand a poor lay summary versus the same lay summary that is written for anyone to understand. This will allow researchers to see the relationship between accessibility, engagement, and reading comprehension.
Slide 7: So to recap, this study sought out to explore the accessibility and engagement of lay summaries within the field of medicine. The results indicate that accessibility and engagement of lay summaries are not as adequate as they should be since the average score in section four of the rubric for all journals was 1.35 out of 5. These results show that more science communication is needed to enhance lay summaries and encourage more publishing of lay summaries to meet the needs of patients, and the general public.
Slide 8: Here are my references.
Slide 9: And thank you for listening.
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One Reply to “Lay Summaries in Medicine – Accessibility and Engagement”
Have you ever written a lay summary of your research? Was it for a scientific meeting or a scientific journal? How was it? Did you follow any specific guidance?
As for a scientific abstract/summary you usually ask your research fellows to review it, for a lay abstract/summary the feedback of your non-scientific friends or family members may be as important! Tell us more about your experience!