I'm investigating the benefits or pitfalls of including lay or plain-language summaries with clinical studies. There are a lot of arguments for it (see research piece: Preprint PLS and patient engagement
Would you consider this good, bad, necessary ....? What should a lay summary include as a minimum to ensure the paper is correctly represented? Is a different skill set required to write a lay summary - should the author write it or should it be written by an objective reviewer?
A lay summary would often be difficult given the precision of a science.
Difficult I agree in some instances. A pre-set template or checklist might help though?
It is a very good question Anne.
I think that for some research articles and journals this could be feasible but for others it that might difficult because sometimes research migth be too technical.
A template would definetely help. And maybe allowing for a third party doing the plain-summarize as you proposed could be the best way to implement it.
Thanks Carlos. This is correct for some papers where the detail and the technical processes themselves are the research. For many papers maybe it would be possible to summarise the main concept, procedure and outcome and attach a checklist to highlight any risks of bias or other flaws using http://www.equator-network.org/ for instance. Equally, highlight any stand-out positive elements. There are some papers which I'll dig out and which provide some suggestions or guidance on what should be included, but nothing concrete as far as I know.
As to who should do it, it's looking more likely that it should be done by a third party, maybe a peer reviewer, as you suggest, but with collaboration (approval? endoresement?) from the author(s).
It might need an endorsement from the author(s). Using international validated tools as the guidelines on http://www.equator-network.org is a good way to create the check-list of the plain-language summaries. Hopefully one day the guidelines incorporate this on their checklist
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