Sharing Your Research with Patients? Don’t Make These Mistakes in Plain Language Summaries
Plain language summaries (PLS or Lay summaries)—synopses of research written in non-technical language—are important for non-specialists, such as patients, to understand and use the research findings. PLS(Lay summary) can increase patients’ knowledge, which translates into improved dialogue with healthcare providers and better decision-making. For PLS(Lay summary) to be truly helpful, they should be free of these mistakes:
Terms that only seem simple
Terms like “prospective study” or “cluster sampling” are so widely known among researchers that they often forget that the general public may not understand these accurately. It’s an art to explain these without “dumbing down” the overall PLS(Lay summary). For example: “Test results were reviewed by physicians who did not know which group the patients belonged to” rather than “We followed a double-blinded process; that is, neither the participants nor the physicians knew who was in the treatment group and who was in the control group.” Non-specialists don’t really need a definition of double-blinding but just a description of what happened, while specialists know the term anyway.
Sophisticated language
PLS(Lay summary) are not read exclusively by college-educated native English speakers. Avoid complex sentences and sophisticated vocabulary (e.g., use “raised” instead of “augmented” and “collected” instead of “collated”). Stick to the “subject-verb-object” sentence structure, so that non-native speakers can easily follow the direction of thought.
Avoid: “When diet complies with the guidelines outlined in this article, a decrease of 20–30 percent in the risk of colorectal cancer is anticipated.”
Instead: “The diet we recommend could lower people’s risk of colorectal cancer by 20–30 percent.”
Exaggerated implications
In the quest to be simple, make sure you don’t make claims beyond the results of the study. For example, if your cross-sectional data show that increased egg consumption was significantly associated with severity of depressive symptoms, your PLS(Lay summary) shouldn’t say “eating more eggs reduces depression.” Instead, depending on the limitations of the study, you could say something like “people who eat more eggs may have less severe symptoms of depression” or “we found a potential link between egg consumption and depression.”
Lack of essential details
PLS(Lay summary) are not abstracts in that readers of PLS may not be able to access or comprehend the full paper. PLS(Lay summary) therefore should contain whatever information readers need to apply the findings in their lives. For instance, the study population should be clearly described (at least mention location, ethnicity, sex, age, and comorbidities, and also possibly BMI, education, income, marital status, and employment status, depending on the type of study done). These details are important for readers to know whether the study findings might apply to them.
In biomedicine in particular, patients have the most to gain from research, yet are unable to utilize published research adequately because of technical language. PLS(Lay summary), if drafted appropriately, will go a long way in making research truly accessible. It’s not surprising that PLS will be featured in the upcoming version of the Good Publication Practice guidelines (GPP4). GPP4 should hopefully provide additional guidance on the structure and format of PLS, to promote knowledge transfer and democratization of research.
