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Article published In:
Information Visualization
Edited by Marian Dörk and Isabel Meirelles
[Information Design Journal 25:1] 2019
► pp. 101–109

Pragmatic evaluation of The BMJ’s visual abstracts

| The British Medical Journal
| The British Medical Journal
| The British Medical Journal

The British Medical Journal has recently started making visual abstracts to summarise published research studies. These 1024 × 1024 px images give a quick overview of a trial’s participants, design, and key findings. These visual abstracts are designed to help busy health professionals and researchers get a quick overview of newly published research. The present article describes simple pragmatic evaluations of these visual abstracts: analysis of social media stats and an opportunistic reader survey. Our goals were to identify how useful our readers found this new visual format, and whether there were any improvements we could make. The social media stats were initially very promising. Longer term performance over several visual abstracts, however, was not as strong, suggesting a possible halo effect provided by the novelty of a new presentation format. The survey proved to be a quick and valuable way of getting feedback on the design of the initial template, and resulted in several design adjustments.

Keywords: visual abstracts, data visualisation, health, medicine, graphic design, publishing, science, evaluation, social media
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Methods
  • 3.Problem
    • 3.1Social media performance
  • 4.User survey
  • 5.Solutions
  • 6.Conclusions
  • 7.Addendum: Post-Information+ redesign
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.25.1.08sta
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Aggarwal, Vaibhav
2021. Visual abstracts do not increase some impact scores more than conventional abstracts of clinical research: A retrospective cohort study. Health Information & Libraries Journal 38:4 ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo

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