Clinical Patient Summaries Not Fit for Purpose: A Study in Urology

Abstract

We evaluated the comprehensibility of patient summaries provided by urology journals for the general public. The WebFX online tool was used to assess the readability of abstracts and patient summaries by scoring the text according to established readability indices. A total of 266 articles were included and statistical analysis was performed to compare the readability of abstracts and patient summaries, stratified by article type and text type. The results show that patient summaries consistently performed worse than abstracts for all readability metrics, and the readability levels for both abstracts and patient summaries were more advanced than the recommended guidelines on average. This study suggests that patient summaries provided by these urology journals may not be easily understood by the general population, and tools should be developed to help urological researchers improve the accessibility of their work. PATIENT SUMMARY: We checked how easy it is to read and understand patient summaries and abstracts of research articles from four urology journals. We found that the summaries and abstracts were too hard to read. This study shows that we need to make these summaries easier to read for everyone.

Keywords: Lay summary; Patient summary; Readability.