HOWTO Present a poster session at a science meeting
Here's some comprehensive and entertaining advice for people contemplating giving a poster session at a scientific meeting; much of this applies to any situation in which you hope to catch and hold the attention of passers-by:
Advice on designing scientific posters (via Hack the Planet)
The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the "wine and beer" mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It's not a pretty sight.And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.
(Image: Poster Session, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Nucho's Flickr stream)
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Presenting posters can be so hit and miss. At the last conference I presented at I had a beautiful poster with full colour photos and I won a best present paper award and still only around 5 people read the stupid thing *sigh*
Some of the advice is really good, I'm looking forward to put it in practice.
My2cents: having a bottle of good wine helps to keep people interested (a bit of weed would help too, but I think it's illegal even in the Netherlands).
Eh... the poster sessions are often for papers that didn't really make the full cut in the main sessions, so they explicitly exist as a backdrop for socialization. You basically grab a beer or a plastic glass of wine and wander around looking for something you find interesting. Most of those poster papers aren't that well developed, though occasionally something significant can show up there that just didn't fit into the themes of any of the main sessions.
Avoid a wall of text and use *much* larger fonts than you would expect. Keep it short and leave out a point or two for obvious discussion topics. Remember your citations since someone whose work you've expanded on could very well be reading the poster.
@Keeper: That is only true at some conferences. At APS, where most people can get a 12-minute talk, yes, posters can be that way.
ACS tends to have a bit more of the "doesn't fit the theme" posters since sometimes sub-disciplines of chemistry don't have available talk space. That is, one session of one day, and the big names in that area are always going to get the talk spots.
However, at ACTC (a theoretical chemistry conference), the only talks--save one for a grad student, one for a postdoc, both late in the day--were invited talks. While this led to great talks from big names in the field, everyone else had to present a poster if they wanted to present research.
Too bad Swarthmore is asking for a login to view the link this morning, I would have liked to have read the whole thing.
Who knew the science fair poster went beyond middle school!? Sweet. Too bad they don't get table space for their replica volcanoes too.
In biology, the tradition is that generally the professors give the actual talks and grad students and postdocs are reduced to presenting posters. Most of the pictures from the linked site are from biology conferences and they really are like that -- fields of posters for as far as the eye can see.
Because in biology, professors are mostly grant-writing machines and not hands-on scientific workers, talking to the postdocs and grad students during the poster session is often the only way to actually learn how an experiment was done -- because they were the ones who actually did it.
At the conferences I'm familiar with (ASABE, AOCS, IFT), if you have anything halfway decent you can request either a poster or an oral presentation and you'll probably get whichever you request. I've always chosen oral until once just recently.
Posters are better for actually allowing you some time to interact with people who are interested and have questions about your work. Posters are worse in that if no one is interested, it is painfully obvious (in oral sessions at least, the other presenters and people waiting for the next talk sit and pretend to be interested in your presentation).
A good overview. Note that one of the final lines, about asking people to not photograph posters of "unpublished" research, is a bit dubious: presenting a poster *is* a publication, and once the poster goes up in public, no matter how obscure the venue or how brief the session, the cat is out of the bag. The only remaining question is whether the content has been *widely* published.
My poster session pet peeve: A poster session is a different forum than the oral presentations. It is also different than the proceedings. DO NOT print out your slides and glue them to a board. Do not print out your paper and glue it to a board. Reorganize your presentation to the media of the poster.
The article has some good advice, that even some conference veterans can use. When I was in graduate school, posters were still made up of multiple pieces of paper all pinned up like a community message board, or something... and it seems that there are still people who tend to do that. No one ever stops at their poster.
These days, I actually help organize and put on conferences and conventions for a living, and I think I can also add a couple of suggestions:
* Use the materials provided to hang your poster. They've been chosen for a reason. (Such as, the boards are covered in fuzzy fabric for use with velcro dots, as compared to blue sticky-tack, which never comes out of fuzzy fabric, and so your society is then charged for the price of a new board.)
* Pay close attention to the instructions on where/when to hang your poster, and understand that the organizers (unless specifically stated) will not have the time or resources to "keep an eye" on your mailing tube while you attend sessions.
Check out the old-style "tack up your 8.5x11 plots" at the bottom in the sea of large-format posters. I remember when the ratio of such presentations to the large format ones was inverted at the American Astronomical Society. Way back when everyone was certain the expansion of the Universe was slowing down...
@Tim.
Oh god yes. Many, many posters have ~10x too much text.
This was EXCELLENT. Lots of great suggestions.
@5. Wow, you're a big meanie. You're totally not invited to my birthday party.
Personally, I think that 800 words on a poster is way to much. I used to attend American Astronomical Society meetings, where there were hundreds of new posters up each day for five days. Even if I was interested in a subject, I didn't have the energy to read more than a hundred words or so. I preferred to have a conversation with the presenter.
With that in mind, I tried experimenting with posters with fewer and fewer words. My old web page is gone since I changed jobs, so I don't have my examples up anymore.
Well, a draft of one is still on the internet somewhere. To minimize the words on one poster, I wrote "Galactic Center Haiku". Each of 4 haiku (and one tanka) summarized a journal article. I put it up at a small conference to amuse my friends.
My poster on solar history at the national passive solar conference years ago was up for one day and then trashed by the cleaning crew, just like all the other posters which were supposed to remain on the walls for the rest of the conference. Luckily, I was able to put it back together.
Advice is (a) specific to biology, and (b) appears to believe that only experiments will be presented. Science has no theoretical work?
The poster templates are nice but violate the "no colored backgrounds" rule. This rule exists because poster printers are generally ink jets and a colored background uses an enormous amount of ink to no purpose. This costs lots of money, which freaks the college out.
@4 "leave out a point or two for ... discussion"
Right on.
Science ought to communicate more strategically née scientifically. Game theory is too little respected. Some scientists shoulder an idea that strategic communication is unethical; ridiculous! Strategy and ethics are related and both required considerations, not mutually exclusive.
The idea that "just being natural" is somehow better is antithetical to science itself. BG
Thanks, very helpful. Giving another poster in the fall and happy for the tips.
But I must say, GOD if Science-y posters don't look boring! (sorry!)
My last poster on public history had full-on background color, photographs, and very little text, plus a plate of food.