A Preliminary Study of Health Care Professionals' Preferences for Infographics Versus Conventional Abstracts for Communicating the Results of Clinical Research

摘要

Social media tools are increasingly figuring into the professional lives of health care professionals and are anticipated to be used increasingly as a vehicle for the communication of advances in medicine and continuing education.3 The most popular social media platforms (eg, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+) allow the embedding of static images1 such as infographics. An infographic is any graphically rendered combination of text, pictures, and data visualizations in a manner that tells a complete story.2 Our study examined whether infographics might be used to communicate advances in medicine (eg, literature synopses).5 More specifically, the purpose of this study was to assess physician-learner preferences for information presented in 2 alternative formats: infographic and text-only, conventional article abstract.