My assumption is that most readers scan the abstracts of articles before deciding which ones to read in full. Appropriate use of graphics can improve comprehension and possibly make this scanning process more efficient. As the old saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words". Clearly graphics are very popular as can be seen by the popularity of Infographics and Pinterest.
So I decided to try out a free infographic creation tool Piktochart to create a visual representation of the salient points of a study.
I chose this study from the Journal of the American Medical Association because it was the first study that caught my eye in my Google Reader stream after I thought of this idea. So this is what the abstract looks like.
As you can imagine it took me a few minutes to get the main message of the study. What if I had seen this infographic instead? I took all the information from the study abstract. The only thing I added was the Number Needed to Treat (NNT) that I calculated myself.So what do you think? Does an Infographic make it easier to scan journal articles? If so, should journals have data visualization experts on their editorial team to help create these? Should there be standards for creating these, such as blue circles for control groups and yellow for intervention groups, etc?
Neil Mehta MBBS, MS, FACP, practices internal medicine at a large tertiary care hospital in Ohio. He is also the Director of Education Technology (Academic Computing) for his medical school and in charge of his hospital system's home grown Learning and Content Management System. He is interested in use of technology in education, social media and networking, practice management and evidence-based medicine tools, personal information and knowledge management. This post originally appeared at Technology in (Medical) Education.
