Infographics and Visual Abstracts

Abstract

Medical educators teach and disseminate information to learners who are often in time-pressured clinical learning environments that can limit their ability to process and understand information. Heightening this challenge is the ongoing need for learners to access, identify, and apply relevant information from a high volume of new or existing literature. Creating and using digestible visual summaries of high-yield takeaways can overcome some of these challenges. However, most educators are unaware of strategies and tools for creating and disseminating concise, high-quality visual summaries.Infographics provide a visual representation of information, and visual abstracts are a subset of infographics used to synopsize key findings from an article. Through intentional use of design elements and visual-spatial reorganization of content, readers can process complex information more easily. Visual representations are time-efficient and designed to engage the reader's visual processing capacity and decrease cognitive workload. In fact, studies have found that visual abstracts result in equivalent or increased knowledge transfer and retention when added to text.1,2 The use of infographics and visual abstracts on social media platforms is associated with higher engagement and Altmetric scores than the dissemination of medical literature citations alone.3 In a randomized controlled trial the use of a visual abstract resulted in articles being read nearly 3 times as often.4