Yi Lan, Yang Xiaohu
Zhejiang University, China.
Chongqing University, China.
Autism. 2023 Nov;27(8):2555-2559. doi: 10.1177/13623613231163083. Epub 2023 Mar 25.
Research papers are sometimes hard to follow. Lay abstracts give a short account of research papers. However, it is unclear whether lay abstracts are readable to the lay people. This study examined the readability of 570 abstracts and lay abstracts published between 2020 and 2022 in the journal . We found that that lay abstracts are easier to read than abstracts but are harder to read than news reports. The findings suggest that lay abstracts, on average, are hard to read for the lay people. We propose that the journal and its authors may invite reviewers from outside the research community to test whether a lay abstract is readable.
研究论文有时很难理解。非专业摘要对研究论文进行了简短的描述。然而，非专业摘要对于普通大众来说是否易于阅读尚不清楚。本研究调查了2020年至2022年在该期刊上发表的570篇摘要和非专业摘要的可读性。我们发现，非专业摘要比摘要更容易阅读，但比新闻报道更难阅读。研究结果表明，一般来说，非专业摘要对于普通大众而言难以读懂。我们建议该期刊及其作者可以邀请研究领域之外的审稿人来测试一篇非专业摘要是否易于阅读。
