Workshop story: From scientific journal to popular science article

On April 19, 2019, I held the workshop "From scientific journal to popular article"at the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi. It was aimed at researchers at all stages of their careers (junior, mid-career, senior), curious about how to make the step from disseminating research results in scientific journals, accessed only by specialists in the field, to popularizing them to the general public.

Most research valorization articles are based on articles published in scientific journals, "translated" in language, approach and structure so that they will be of interest to and understood by non-specialist audiences.

The workshop was practical and each participant worked on a scientific article of their choice, learning to:

• explain complex concepts until they are understood by an audience outside that scientific field
• turn scientific jargon into everyday, fresh and lively language
• change the structure of the information in the original article so that it becomes an easy-to-understand text
• choose, among several topics of scientific interest, the one or ones that are relevant to the public.

At the end of the workshop, I administered a questionnaire to see how well the participants had retained the key concepts, and to test which ideas were surprising and easy to remember. Here are what they were, through the eyes of those who attended the workshop:

How to structure a press release, use of appropriate language (neither too complicated nor too simple is good), adaptation to the target audience;

The paper should be short, concise and to the point, not a lot of scientific terms, but a complete lack of them is not recommended either;

You don't have to eliminate technical terms completely, but the ideas should be rendered in a way that is understandable to the general public, avoiding long sentences;

I've learned that you have to extract the essence of the essence and that it's very helpful to empathize and figure out what would be relevant to the other person.

About the difference between scientific dissemination, as it is understood in the research community, and the popularisation of research results - something that is required in research projects and projects funded by European funds - I have also written in Journalistic article vs scientific article - what are the main differences.