The Role of Graphical Abstracts in Enhancing Research Visibility | Editage Insights

Graphical abstracts are in great demand in the scientific community, with top journals and publishers requesting or even mandating their submission. However, do graphical abstracts truly enhance research visibility? What exactly is the role of graphical abstracts in research? Here’s a deep dive into it.

Graphical Abstracts for Social Media Dissemination

Research dissemination is no longer restricted to journal magazines and periodicals. With the evolution of social media and short-form content, the scientific community has learned to embrace the rapid changes in content dissemination. Here are key reasons for researchers adopting graphical abstracts:

• Visual summaries are known to retain readers’ attention better than textual content. 

• Graphical abstracts are the means of reaching out to a wider and more diverse audience, even in the non-scientific community. 

• Research-appropriate graphical abstracts, presented in an engaging format, pique the curiosity of readers.

However, what is the actual impact of graphical abstracts on research articles being read/downloaded/cited? The answer is quite surprising.

Impact of Graphical Abstracts on Research Paper Performance

As scientists, you want more than just to “inform” the community of our research—you want your research to be seen, read, digested, and investigated further. Several studies focused on analyzing whether graphical abstracts played a role in improving the overall performance of research articles. Here’s a summary.

• In 2016, researchers statistically compared papers with and without graphical abstracts published in Molecules between March 2014 and March 2015 by considering several output parameters that reflected visibility. Contrary to the popular claim, they found that research manuscripts published without graphical abstracts performed significantly better in terms of PDF downloads, abstract views, and total citations than research papers with graphical abstracts!
  However, graphical abstracts in academic journals were relatively new at this point, and the researchers focused on a single journal and a limited period. This warranted further studies by including a larger number of different journals to validate the pattern observed in their study.
  
• In 2021, a retrospective cohort study concluded that visual abstracts might not be effective to disseminate scientific research considering the time and costs involved.
  However, the study focused on journals that publish general medical topics with a broad readership. The researchers indicated that their conclusion may not be applicable to specialty journals with a specific readership, which often publish papers that are too complex to be understood by lay people.
• In 2022, two interesting studies offered new insights into the impact of graphical abstracts on research dissemination in the medical field.
  Klaassen et al. compared the use of graphical abstracts vs. key figures of original manuscripts published in European Urology and assessed their ability to increase reader engagement through social media. They found that visual abstracts increased the reach on social media with higher impressions on X and retweets/likes than the key figures of research manuscripts. However, full-article link clicks were greater through key figures.
  In another study, researchers determined that graphical abstracts were not only effective in increasing the impact factor of journals in the fields of gastroenterology and hepatology but also increased citations and social media exposure of individual articles.
  This underscores the benefits of graphical abstracts for both journals and authors!
• In 2023, a study reported that graphical abstracts created better first impressions and led to higher usage of textual abstracts. However, no substantial differences were observed between articles with and without graphical abstracts on the usage of full-length articles or citations.

Key Takeaways

So, if there is no hard evidence to support that graphical abstracts contribute to increasing the readership of your research articles, why should you continue to prepare them?

• Many journals and publishers have seen the impact of including graphical abstracts on their impact factors. Therefore, the demand for graphical abstracts and visual summaries has not diminished.
• Even if graphical abstracts do not improve click-through rates, they are highly effective in publicizing your research on different social media platforms.
• Because of the extended reach, graphical abstracts can also help you connect with diverse researchers across the globe and lead to interesting collaborations.

Despite the additional time, cost, and effort, creating graphical abstracts that are appropriate for your research and field is indeed one of the best ways to disseminate scientific knowledge as well as enhance research visibility.