Impact - Lay summary

Increase the visibility, readership, impact and transparency of your research paper

In a constantly evolving media landscape there is little debate as to the value of a lay summary. Studies show that scientists who communicate their research to a lay audience enjoy increased visibility and impact, and greater citations 1, 2. ScienceOpen see a 21% increase in average article views for users who added one or more lay summaries in their publication list on ScienceOpen. Studies also report that communication to non-specialists can enhance reputation among peers, as well as increase academic productivity 3, 4.

But with heavy administrative workloads and without the necessary skills to translate complex scientific concepts into accessible language for a wider audience, most scientific researchers would agree that writing a lay summary is just too time consuming to be considered a priority.

See a sample lay summary created by Science Impact
  1. Thelwall M, Haustein S, Larivière V, Sugimoto CR (2013) Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services. PLOS ONE 8(5):e64841
  2. Liang X, et al. (2014) Building buzz: (Scientists) communicating science in new media environments.Journalism Mass Commun Q 91(4):772–791
  3. Liang X, et al. (2014) Building buzz: (Scientists) communicating science in new media environments.Journalism Mass Commun Q 91(4):772–791
  4. Peters HP, et al. (2008) Science communication. Interactions with the mass media. Science321(5886):204–205

A lay summary of your paper, accessible for all, written for just £99


Science Impact has the expertise to write a concise lay summary of your research in a format and language that a wide audience will understand.

For a total flat fee of £99, your research paper will be summarised into a 600 word lay summary. The lay summary will be under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence, meaning you and any co-authors will be free to distribute the summary by email, via your own project, university or stakeholder websites, social media accounts and blogs, and directly through publisher platforms such as Ingenta Connect, ScienceOpen and institutional repositories; effectively increasing the number of ways the general public, journalists, decision-makers and stakeholders can access an easy-to-understand version of your research.

Why Science Impact?

We are an award-winning team of leading science communication staff with decades of combined experience publishing academic books, papers and broad science publications. Our team has worked with over 5,000 research projects to help disseminate impact and facilitate outreach.

Sample feedback from dissemination activities carried out on behalf of researchers:

I am very satisfied – very good job done by you and your team!

  • EU PROJECT LEADER

As a leader of the large project supported by Japanese government, I have to help people understand what we are working on. The production of a summary of our research though an article in the Impact publication and the brochure that was produced on the research project will be a great assistance in the communication of our work, especially as we are working in Japan and communicating internationally is very important for us. The process to produce the article was easy and we are pleased with the final article and brochure and would recommend the services of Science impact.

  • PROJECT LEADER
  • National Institutes of Natural Science, Japan

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About Impact Legacy

If you are interested in finding out more about how this process works or to discuss the production of a lay summary for your research paper, please contact us.

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