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P233: Journey to the Center of Plain Language Summaries (PLS): A Retrospective analysis of Audience Engagement Measures

Poster Presenter

Ayush Sood

Post-Doctoral Fellow, MASC, Clinical Development and Medical Affairs
Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
United States

Objectives

This study looks to explore and evaluate audience engagement with plain language summaries through analyzing metrics provided by Altmetric to determine if these publications should be included as a standard of practice alongside the original trial publication.

Method

For this study, we utilized Altmetric to examine the number and viewership avenues of plain language summaries published in the last 5 years. The top 10 PLS based on Altmetric scores were compared to their corresponding clinical trials to observe any increased engagement between the two sources.

Results

The results included an analysis of 139 unique PLS that were identified and associated with clinical trial results or a disease state summary. Commentaries on PLS guidelines or PLS use cases were excluded. The Journal Future Oncology was observed to have published the most PLS, at 51, which was followed by Neurodegenerative Disease Management at 14 and Immunotherapy and Future Cardiology even at 11 for third highest. The highest Altmetric score was 398, followed by 75, with a score of 19 rounding out the top 11 instead of top 10 when accounting for some PLS having the same score. For the overall data set, news mentions, twitter mentions, number of dimensions citations and number of Mendeley readers showcased potential audience viewership tracking opportunities. For the top 11 PLS, the mean twitter mentions were 32, the mean news mentions were 9, the mean number of Mendeley readers were 15 and the mean number of dimensions citations were 4. In comparing the top 11 PLS metrics with their corresponding clinical trial or disease state publications, it was seen that across all aforementioned audience engagement categories, the original publications exhibited higher scores, with averages of 541, 80, 476, 547 for the same categories mentioned above, respectively. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) was the leading publisher among the top 11 original publications, accounting for 5 of the entries. Although nearly every engagement metric was much higher for the original publication vs. it’s PLS counterpart, scores were most similar when comparing disease state PLS to their original publication, potentially demonstrating an increased patient following.

Conclusion

This study underscored that audiences of PLS and their corresponding original publications most frequently interact with these pieces through news outlets or social media such as tweets on the X platform. For nearly every one of the top 11 analyzed PLS, the corresponding original publication had higher observed engagement across all categories that were highlighted. This may have been because the original publication came out months to years prior to the PLS, which amounted to a longer viewership and audience discussion interval. A follow-up study to this study may be one that aims to observe simultaneous trends by conducting a similar analysis for Plain Language Summary Publications (PLSPs) to observe engagement metrics for both the PLSP and adjacent publication over the same interval. When examining the most prevalent PLS content focus overall and among the top 11, it was seen that oncology comprised nearly half of the works, demonstrating that this topic is viewed as a complex subject area warranting a case for a PLS to accompany every oncology clinical trial publication. Overall, social media, specifically tweets on X represented the highest observed scores for reported metrics, underscoring that commentary and awareness elicited by health care professionals and organizations or journal entities may help highlight important medical advancements with PLS representing a mechanism to reach wider audiences given time constraints of providers and varying health literacy levels of the general populace.