Journal articles are the key means for communicating scientific research. In the last century, science has become increasingly specialized such that journals commonly target researchers from ever narrower sub-disciplines. However, even in specialist journals, the research published can be relevant to scientists from other disciplines and to nonscientists including policymakers, managers, educators, and the general public (Knight 2003). Unfortunately, such broad audiences do not always find traditional articles easily accessible because they are written using an academic style that includes low readability of text and confusing jargon (Falkenberg and Tubb 2017).

An approach to enhance the accessibility of articles by broader audiences is the inclusion of “lay summaries” (hereafter referred to as summaries) alongside traditional abstracts. Summaries typically describe the issue studied in the paper, the research gap that was addressed, the key conclusion that addresses this gap written in general terms, and highlights the significance of the work with the goal of facilitating communication of the most important contribution of each manuscript across disciplines (e.g., L&O Letters https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/23782242/about/author-guidelines, last accessed 20 December 2023; American Geophysical Union https://www.agu.org/publish-with-agu/publish/author-resources/plain-language-summary, last accessed 20 December 2023). While not replacing traditional abstracts, summaries are where authors are expected to communicate their research in less-technical ways that would appeal to new audiences (Breeze 2016). Indeed, nontechnical summaries have been advocated to increase the visibility, impact, and transparency of scientific research, particularly to nonscientific audiences (https://scientific-publishing.webshop.elsevier.com/publication-recognition/lay-summary-promote-work-outside-academia/#:~:text=Another%20reason%20to%20write%20a,academic%20background%20understand%20your%20work, last accessed 20 December 2023; Kuehne and Olden 2015). However, despite the goal of summaries, we know little about their accessibility to the target audiences, which can be defined by their readability and jargon content (Sharon and Baram-Tsabari 2014). Therefore, using this definition, we explore whether summaries are more accessible than abstracts, identify the guidance that journal publishers give to authors for writing summaries, and provide recommendations to authors, publishers, and editors to support the writing of article summaries with improved accessibility.

期刊文章是传播科学研究成果的重要手段。在上个世纪，科学变得越来越专业化，以至于期刊通常针对来自更狭窄的子学科的研究人员。然而，即使在专业期刊上，发表的研究也可能与其他学科的科学家以及包括政策制定者、管理者、教育工作者和公众在内的非科学家相关（Knight  2003）。不幸的是，如此广泛的受众并不总是觉得传统文章很容易理解，因为它们是用学术风格编写的，其中包括文本可读性低和令人困惑的术语（Falkenberg 和 Tubb  2017）。

提高更广泛受众对文章的可访问性的一种方法是将“简单摘要”（以下简称摘要）与传统摘要一起纳入。摘要通常描述论文中研究的问题、所解决的研究差距、解决这一差距的关键结论，并用一般术语强调工作的重要性，以促进每篇手稿最重要贡献的交流跨学科（例如，L&O Letters https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/23782242/about/author-guidelines，上次访问时间为 2023 年 12 月 20 日；美国地球物理联盟 https://www.agu.org/ publish-with-agu/publish/author-resources/plain-language-summary，上次访问时间为 2023 年 12 月 20 日）。摘要虽然不会取代传统的摘要，但作者希望以技术性较低的方式交流他们的研究，从而吸引新的受众（Breeze  2016）。事实上，人们提倡使用非技术性摘要来提高科学研究的可见性、影响力和透明度，特别是对于非科学受众而言 (https://scientific-publishing.webshop.elsevier.com/publication-recognition/lay-summary-promote-work -outside-academia/#:~:text=Another%20reason%20to%20write%20a,academic%20background%20understand%20your%20work，上次访问时间为 2023 年 12 月 20 日；Kuehne 和 Olden 2015  ）。然而，尽管摘要的目标是，我们对目标受众的可访问性知之甚少，这可以通过其可读性和行话内容来定义（Sharon 和 Baram-Tsabari  2014）。因此，使用这个定义，我们探讨摘要是否比摘要更容易理解，确定期刊出版商为作者提供的撰写摘要的指导，并向作者、出版商和编辑提供建议，以支持文章摘要的撰写，并提高可访问性。