Wen Ju, He Sike, Yi Lan
School of Liberal Education, Chengdu Jincheng College, Sichuan, China.
West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University, Sichuan, China.
Autism Res. 2023 May;16(5):935-940. doi: 10.1002/aur.2917. Epub 2023 Mar 10.
Communicating science to the general public could sometimes be problematic partly because the language used in scientific writing was difficult to understand for people outside the scientific community. Against this backdrop, lay summaries were introduced to the research community. Lay summaries are short, non-technical summaries of scientific articles that are aimed at a lay audience. Despite the increasing attention on the roles that lay summaries play in scientific communication, it remains unclear whether they are comprehensible to the lay audience. To address the foregoing concerns, this study examines the readability of lay summaries published in Autism Research. It was found that lay summaries were more readable than traditional abstracts but were not easy enough to read for the lay audience. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.
向公众传播科学有时可能会出现问题，部分原因是科学写作中使用的语言对于科学界以外的人来说难以理解。在这种背景下，研究界引入了通俗摘要。通俗摘要是针对普通受众的科学文章的简短、非技术性总结。尽管通俗摘要在科学传播中所起的作用越来越受到关注，但它们是否能被普通受众理解仍不清楚。为了解决上述问题，本研究考察了发表在《自闭症研究》上的通俗摘要的可读性。研究发现，通俗摘要比传统摘要更具可读性，但对于普通受众来说阅读起来仍不够容易。文中讨论了这些发现的可能解释。
