Adding Plain Language Summaries to Support Research that Address Social Inequities
By Avren Keating and Elena Conroy
As part of SAGE’s mission of building bridges to knowledge and commitment to fostering a more inclusive and diverse publishing community, SAGE Journals is adding Plain Language Summaries (PLS), or nontechnical abstracts, as an option authors can add to their articles for select journals participating in the pilot. The summaries will appear wherever abstracts are available (just below the abstract) and are open to all readers. As an initial priority, SAGE’s goal is to add the PLS function to a limited trial of journals that highlight research representing oppressed, marginalized or otherwise silenced communities.
A PLS (also known as a “public lay summary,” a “plain language summary,” or “lay abstract”) is very similar to a typical abstract, with the key distinction that it is written without field-specific vocabulary. The PLS addresses a non-researcher audience—such as policymakers, media, and nonexperts, and contributes to public understanding of the subject matter. In short, we want those who are impacted by the research in our journals to have improved access to its implications. If you are having trouble accessing the articles, we invite you to read this blog post guiding you through the process.
SAGE has already begun adding PLS to some of our open access journals, starting with the Therapeutic Advances journals, to make research more accessible to patients. Since 2019, Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety has asked authors to include PLS in their research articles. This was done in collaboration with the journal’s new Patient Advisory Board to ensure that patient representatives were consulted to increase accessibility in published research. We are now expanding those efforts to more social science journals and non-medical journals in our pilot.
We want our research to foster evidence-based conversations and social justice policy initiatives. At SAGE, “We believe that social and behavioral sciences can improve, and even save, lives,” writes Sara Miller McCune. Adding the PLS to these impactful journals is one step on that path, and it is our responsibility as a social science research publisher to highlight the concerns and voices of those who have historically been left out of the conversation.
Project PLS is an effort of SAGE Journals’s DEI initiative taskforce. By way of transparency, its structure is outlined here. Diversity is one of the cornerstones of a vibrant culture and we are undertaking work to build a SAGE that is more equitable and representative of the communities we serve and of which we are part. To read more about our commitments to diversity, equity, belonging, justice, and anti-oppression, please visit our DEI hub here. For more about this policy and to provide feedback relating to SAGE’s efforts more broadly, please email info@sagepub.com.
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