The first part of a plain language summary is a restatement of the review’s title using plain language terms. It should include participants and intervention (and outcome, when included in the title of the review). As an example, a review title of ‘Anticholinergic drugs versus other medications for overactive bladder syndrome in adults’ might have a plain language title ‘Drugs for overactive bladder syndrome’. Where the review title is easily understood, this should simply be restated as the plain language title, e.g. ‘Interventions to reduce harm from continued tobacco use’.
The plain language title should not be declarative (it should not reflect the conclusions of the review). It should be written in sentence case (i.e. with a capital at the beginning of the title and for names, but the remainder in lower case; see examples above), should not be more than 256 characters in length, and should not end with a full stop.