Translating the evidence of psychological meta-analyses into plain language

Scientific articles are often hard to understand for non-scientists. This is partly due to the fact that such articles use technical terms and statistical concepts without explaining them, since they are considered to be common knowledge for their scientific audience. Additionally, researchers may tend to pay more attention to the scientific relevance of their findings and less attention to their practical relevance to the broader public when discussing them in scientific publications. To address these problems, plain language summaries (PLS)—easily comprehensible research summaries that complement scientific abstracts—were introduced. With the aim to develop empirically validated guidelines for writing PLS in psychology, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) started the project “PLan Psy”. This project aims at finding a standardized way to translate findings of psychological meta-analyses into PLS. This protocol outlines the design of the third empirical study of PLan Psy, which will, by applying an experimental design, investigate psychology-specific aspects of how to optimally communicate meta-analytical evidence to laypersons.

Scientific articles are often hard to understand for non-scientists. This is partly due to the fact that such articles use technical terms and statistical concepts without explaining them, since they are considered to be common knowledge for their scientific audience. Additionally, researchers may tend to pay more attention to the scientific relevance of their findings and less attention to their practical relevance to the broader public when discussing them in scientific publications. To address these problems, plain language summaries (PLS)—easily comprehensible research summaries that complement scientific abstracts—were introduced. However, empirically validated guidelines on how to write such PLS focus mostly on biomedical research, for example, the Cochrane guidelines (Jelicic Kadic et al., 2016; Santesso et al., 2008). With the aim to develop empirically validated guidelines for writing PLS in psychology, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) started the project “PLan Psy”. This project aims to find a standardized way to translate findings of psychological meta-analyses into PLS. The following protocol outlines the design of the sixth empirical study of PLan Psy, which will investigate psychology-specific aspects of how to optimally communicate meta-analytical evidence to laypersons via an experimental design.