Pick up pretty much any science journal, and you’ll see that each of the studies starts with an abstract - a summary of the study.
Yes, lovely, very informative.
But take a peek at certain journals, and you’ll see something else - graphical abstracts, video abstracts, and plain-language (less technical) abstracts. The idea behind these types of abstracts is to make the science understandable to people who aren’t experts in the field of study.
But do they?
That’s what Kate Bredbenner and Sanford Simon from Rockefeller University wanted to know, so they did a study to assess how well each of the different types of abstracts did in terms of people’s comprehension, perceived understanding, enjoyment, and desire to see those types of abstracts again.
They took two science papers and made a plain-language summary, a graphical, and a video abstract to go along with the traditional abstract the papers already had. These abstracts were shown to a group of people who volunteered for the study. These participants had science, science-related, or non-science careers. Each participant was shown one abstract and then asked a series of questions.
Here are the highlights of what the study found:
✅ Before the study started, the participants ranked which type of abstract they would prefer to get their science info. The options they could choose from were written summaries, graphics/infographics, videos, audio, and reading the original research. Generally, written summaries were preferred over graphics, which were preferred over videos and then audio. As for research papers, unsurprisingly, non-science participants weren’t too excited by the thought of reading a research paper. Science-related participants ranked research papers second behind written summaries. Science participants put research papers on top.
📽️ Video scored the highest for comprehension, understanding, enjoyment, and desired updates. Plain-language summaries also did very well. There were some small differences in how well they did between science, science-related, and non-science participants, but nothing wild. For example, non-science and science participants enjoyed video the most, whereas science-related participants enjoyed videos and plain-language summaries equally.
💡 A little nuance. For one of the papers, comprehension was much better for participants who said they preferred reading original research (that’s the science people) to get scientific information than those who ranked reading the original research pretty low in their preferences (that’s the non-science people). Bredbenner and Simon think this is down to that paper requiring more background knowledge to understand it.
Ok, researchers, I know the question you have - does one type of abstract result in more citations?
In a nutshell…
This study doesn’t say.
But wouldn’t that make for an interesting, long-term study?
If you want to read the paper for yourself, it’s open-access 👇
Bredbenner K, Simon SM (2019) Video abstracts and plain language summaries are more effective than graphical abstracts and published abstracts. PLOS ONE 14(11): e0224697: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224697