A summary to communicate evidence from systematic reviews to the public improved understanding and accessibility of information: a randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate a new format of a summary, which presents research from synthesized evidence to patients and the public. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We conducted a randomized controlled trial in 143 members of the public from five countries (Canada, Norway, Spain, Argentina, and Italy). Participants received either a new summary format (a plain language summary [PLS]) or the current format used in Cochrane systematic reviews. The new PLS presents information about the condition and intervention, a narrative summary of results, and a table of results with absolute numbers for effects of the intervention and quality of the evidence using Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation. RESULTS: With the new PLS, more participants understood the benefits and harms and quality of evidence (53% vs. 18%, P < 0.001); more answered each of the five questions correctly (P ≤ 0.001 for four questions); and they answered more questions correctly, median 3 (interquartile range [IQR]: 1-4) vs. 1 (IQR: 0-1), P < 0.001). Better understanding was independent of education level. More participants found information in the new PLS reliable, easy to find, easy to understand, and presented in a way that helped make decisions. Overall, participants preferred the new PLS. CONCLUSION: This new PLS format for patients and the public is a promising tool to translate evidence from synthesized research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.908 | 0.983 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.044 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".