Vulgarizing: an underdeveloped skill...

A study published in The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science by Université Laval professor Lynne Bowker suggests that popularization efforts in scientific journals are highly variable, and that there is still much room for improvement.

The researcher compiled the frequency of articles with lay abstracts in the 22 scholarly journals of the country's largest scientific publisher. Of these, only 3 offered lay abstracts and encouraged researchers to produce them.

The reasons for this apparent lack of interest on the part of scientists are of various kinds:

• the ease of speaking "jargon" among scientists;
• the additional workload involved in intelligently popularizing an article;
• lack of competence to do so;
• lack of incentives to do so;
• the lack of interest in explaining to non-specialists...

If publishers are interested in increasing the accessibility of their publications, the easiest way to do this is through AI.

"Can you summarize this text for me to make it accessible to a non-specialist audience, taking care to define specialized terms and underlining conclusive elements?"

Some already do!

For the full article: Popularized abstracts in scientific journals: plenty of room for improvement - Jean Hamann
https://nouvelles.ulaval.ca/2025/04/01/resumes-vulgarises-dans-les-revues-scientifiques:-beaucoup-de-place-a-l'amelioration-ebdaf507-6440-4217-9777-b89f2159e536

Investigating the Use of Plain Language Summaries in Canadian Science Journals
https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/cjils/article/view/19419

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