Trial reportBMJ open2021
How well do doctors understand a scientific article in English when it is not their first language? A randomised controlled trial.
Trial report in BMJ open, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- Overcoming Barriers: The AO Foundation's Role in Latin American Scientific Growth.Craniomaxillofacial trauma & reconstruction · 2025Article
- The application effect of the Rasch measurement model combined with the CRF model: An analysis based on English discourse.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionEnglish is the
methodsObjectives: To compare doctors' comprehension of a scientific article when read in their first language (Norwegian) versus their second language (English). Our hypothesis was that doctors reading the article in Norwegian would comprehend the content better than those reading it in English.
designParallel group randomised controlled trial. We randomised doctors to read the same clinical review article in either Norwegian or English, before completing a questionnaire about the content of the article.
settingConference in primary care medicine in Norway, 2018.
participants130 native Norwegian-speaking doctors, 71 women and 59 men. One participant withdrew before responding to the questionnaire and was excluded from the analyses.
interventionsParticipants were randomly assigned to read a review article in either Norwegian (n=64) or English (n=66). Reading time was limited to 7 min followed by 7 min to answer a questionnaire.
main outcome measuresTotal score on questions related to the article content (potential range -9 to 20).
resultsDoctors who read the article in Norwegian had a mean total score of 10.40 (SD 3.96) compared with 9.08 (SD 3.47) among doctors who read the article in English, giving a mean difference of 1.32 (95% CI 0.03 to 2.62; p=0.046). Age was independently associated with total score, with decreased comprehension with increasing age.
conclusionThe difference in comprehension between the group who read in Norwegian and the group who read in English was statistically significant but modest, suggesting that the language gap in academia is possible to overcome.
Indexed as
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.