Library Research Support

Providing a plain language summary with your work, makes your research more accessible to a lay or public audience, by presenting it in a clear and jargon free way.

You can provide a plain language summary to accompany an accepted or published journal or conference papers which you are depositing on Elements.

For papers you are adding manually

There are two ways you can add a summary when you are creating a new record for a journal article or conference paper in Elements:

• If your summary has been published online, for example on a journal’s webpages or on a service such as Kudos, enter a link to your summary in the ‘Plain language URL’ field which can be found as an ‘Additional information’ field.
  or
• If you wish to create a summary you can enter the text into the ‘Plain language summary’ field which can be found in the ‘Additional information’ section.

For papers with a record on Elements/SHURA

If there is already a record for your paper on Elements/SHURA and you would like a lay summary to be added, please contact the Library Research Support Team who can arrange for the amendments to be made.

• Email: library-research-support@shu.ac.uk
• Call: (0114) 225 3852

You may also be interested in this information about writing a plain language summary.

Below are some examples of guidance on writing a plain language or lay summary.

• The publisher Elsevier provide this brief guide: In a nutshell: how to write a lay summary.
• How to write and publish a plain language summary - a guide from the publisher, Taylor & Francis.
• The NIHR provide information about writing plain English summaries.
• The Plain English Campaign provide free guides, including a guide on How to write in plain English.

One of the advantages of generative AI such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot is that you can use it to generate plain language summaries for your publications.

The trick is to write a good prompt that will yield the desired outcome. Andy Tattersall shows how in this blogpost.

Please remember that you are responsible for the final outcome, so please review the content and edit where necessary to ensure the information is accurate before dissemination. 

We also encourage all authors to distribute their plain language summaries widely in order to boost communication about their research findings.