The view from the floor of ISMPP 2025

I recently attended the 21st annual meeting of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP). I was quite excited by this, because this was the first chance I had to present at a conference for a few years! 

This conference was different than most others I had been to. I normally go to scientific conferences. This meeting is certainly adjacent to academics, but people at this meeting are not mainly professors and graduate students in universities. They are communication professionals in businesses.

The contributed poster session was relatively small: 72 posters in total. But this did mean that the organizers were able to do a few things with posters that I had not seen at larger conferences.

Here are a few things I noticed.

More gloss

Many medical writing companies employ graphic designers. (I even met a graphic designer at a roundtable!) So it was not surprising that conference posters on display looked like that had been done by someone with more experience than a science grad student.

The choice of colours was more coherent. There were more graphic elements, particularly icons.

Instead of pie charts, there were donut charts with summary percentages in the middle, and other less common variations.

Same problems

Despite what seemed to be the hand of graphic designers, many posters still needed editors. I still saw many posters that contained mostly columns of small text. (Don’t bother clicking to enlarge on the example below; it is blurry on purpose).

The example above show the big blocks of small text that are the enemy of conference poster design.

Speaking of bad habits shared by academics and medical writers...

Jargon resists attempts to kill it

Medical communications professionals are rightly interested in making sure that people of many different kinds of educations and backgrounds are able to understand medical research. There were many posters about PLSs and PLPSs.

That’s “plain language summaries” and “plain language publication summaries.”

A suggestion I have for anyone writing a plain language summary? Don’t call it a PLS or PLPS. Try not to use any new acronyms at all.

Promoting posters of note

I liked that some posters got spotlighted. This conference had no contributed oral presentations, as far as I could see; only posters. The program committee reviewed the abstracts and picked a few that they thought were worth more attention.

The authors of two posters were given the chance to present their works after a keynote, in a big ballroom.

The authors of two more posters were featured in a “Guided poster tour.” When there were several parallel tracks of programming on the first afternoon, one option was to go to the room where the main poster session was held. The poster presenters had a microphone and small portable speaker, and were able to talk to whoever came in to hear them.

It was much like a regular poster presentation, except that there were no other presenters in the room competing for attention, and so the room was much quieter. The speakers were able to address a larger audience, and just had to do it once for everyone who came by. There was no expectation that they would go over the material for a few people individually.

Poster scavenger hunt

Another clever way to  promote people checking out posters was a “scavenger hunt” in the conference app. Clicking the link led to a survey with questions about posters. Some questions gave you a specific poster to check out, with a question about the content. Other questions gave you some data or information presented on a poster, and asked you to identify the poster number.

If posters aren’t together, the venue is too small 

I did not like that posters were in at least three different locations. In a room with only posters, the vendor’s room, and scattered throughout the hallway.

I spent much time in the main poster session room where I was presenting, and almost overlooked some of the posters in the hallways. 

Not related to posters, but a nice bit of design...

Clever badges

The front of the attendee badge is standard stuff. The back, however...

The back of the badge features a small program guide! I hadn’t seen this done before. Great way to use space that normally goes to waste.

The conference organizers did some quite innovative things with their contributed posters. Although this has the advantage of being a smaller meeting with a relatively small number of posters, I think several of these ideas could be used at meetings that are substantially bigger.

We have a long way to go on poster accessibility

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

This poll from this weekˆs ISMPP annual meeting shows how far we have to go in the field of conference posters:

Almost half of medical communication professionals – people whose job is to make medical research more widely distributed and more powerful – don’t think about make posters accessible.

My quick tip for better accessibility:

Fewer words, bigger.

How many people around you wear glasses or contacts? The world can be blurry for them! Bigger is easier to see!

Making statements with section headings on your conference poster

A new paper by Wolfe and colleagues (in press) provide a new suggestion for improving your poster.

Do not use generic section headings like “Introduction,” “Methods,” “Results,” and “Discussion.” Instead, use longer descriptive headings that give the main points of each section.

For example, instead of writing:

Reaching out to resources

They suggest a longer but more informative heading:

 Women report reaching out to more resources than men

The team call these, “Complete assertion headings.” There are two examples in the paper I have reproduced here; click either to enlarge! Table II in the full paper also lists multiple examples.

The team tested this format against the billboard poster pioneered by Mike Morrison and the “Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion’ (IMRAD or, as Wolfe and company call it, IMRD) formats.

They did two tests. Both of them used posters about the same content formatted in three different ways. Viewers of posters were scored on their comprehension of the poster and their preferences. 

The first was with undergraduates. The authors wrote that students are not exactly the target audience for posters, who tend to be a bit further along in their studies. So they conducted a second study, using “engineering professionals,” which was a mix of graduate students and faculty. 

The logic of the second study was generally the same, except that instead of testing for comprehension directly, they asked how participants how easy it was to understand. This is an important difference, because people’s preferences about content they are trying to learn do not always align with their actual learning (Delauriers et al. 2019).

In both studies, the “Complete assertion headings” generally comes out on top, the billboard format in the middle, and the “journal article on the wall” fares poorest.

Both studies had relatively small samples, between 20 and 25 subjects. I would love to see studies on poster usability that are ten times bigger.

What strikes me is that this format – using headings to guide a reader quickly through a poster – shares much in common with the billboard format and with what I’ve called “the Columbo rule.” 

All three of them emphasize making simple and clear declarative statements. They just differ in where those statements are placed.

• The Columbo rule suggested making the title of the poster a simple declarative statement.
• “Complete assertion headings” suggests using multiple simple statements as the headings for the poster.
• The billboard #betterposter format suggested using most of the body of the poster into a simple declarative statement. 

I think many scientists shy away from making those strong declarative statements. Flat out saying “This is the finding” might feel push and blunt because it runs counter to academic culture. Scientists are taught to be conservative in their interpretation of data. To allow others to inspect data so that they can reach their own conclusions. Not to hype their research. 

These are generally positive things for researchers to do! These are good practices for full presentations of research projects in journals. But in the context of a busy conference, trying to say as little as possible about the data and the interpretation of them makes for much less effective communication.

While I didn’t use the term, I basically used the “Complete assertion heading” format in one of my own posters.

In that post, I wrote:

First, I ditched the standard “IMRAD” headings. My idea was to try to make the poster quickly readable by making every heading a key question or finding. That way, you only had to read a few sentences to get the gist of the poster.

Ahead of my time!

References

Deslauriers L, McCarty LS, Miller K, Callaghan K, Kestin G. 2019. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 201821936. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

Wolfe J, Reineke J, Lott J. 2025. Comparative study of scientific research poster design favors complete assertion headings and no abstracts over other formats. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: In press. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2025.3529094

Related posts

Detective stories: “Whodunnit?” versus “How’s he gonna prove it?”

A poster with no conference, or: What I made in that #SciFund poster class

Water Whys presentation, 28 March 2025: Poster pitfalls and power-ups!

 

I’ll be giving an online presentation tomorrow, March 28 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time or 11:00 a.m. Arizona time.

There is still time to register! Visit https://waterwhys.org/seminar/spring-2025/ to sign up!

Politics hits poster sessions

Alexandra Witze reports:

Here at the ASSW (Arctic Science Summit Week - ZF) Arctic science conference in Boulder, a poster describing research done with US federal funds has words including “ethical” and “equity” crossed out. 🧪

 

 

This is, without question, a response to the American federal government’s attempt to eradicate policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But there are questions as to why someone felt compelled to make this particular response. Did the author(s) make it to draw attention to the policies? Or were they instructed to make the changes by someone above their pay grade?

If you are presenting a poster funded by an American federal agency, have you been asked to change to poster? Would you consider doing so even if not so instructed to avoid having to justify it to some agency administrator?

If you have a story to tell, I’m DoctorZen.66 on Signal.

You can’t have a great poster session in a bad conference

Many academics are aware of predatory or low-quality journals, but I get the impression that many are not as aware of predatory or low-quality conferences.

Christine Ro has just released an article in Nature describing the difficulty of knowing what you’re going to get when you decide to go to a new conference. This is a follow-up to an article last year about exploitative predatory conferences.

An underlying question that is not addressed in either article is, “Why would you go to a conference that you didn’t know?”

Many researchers are introduced to conference through their mentors. Many of them are conferences run by scientific societies. That continuity is a big benefit of societies running annual conferences. They are known and trusted. 

I know from personal experience that people end up with projects that cut across disciplines and are interesting to people in fields that you were not trained in. Again, it is usually not difficult to find a well-established scholarly society that has been running an annual conference for decades.

Why go to a conference that isn’t connected to a society, that doesn’t have a track record? What is the perceived value of going to a new conference by a commercial company? This is not to say such conferences are bad, but they represent a significant change from the tradition of conferences run by academics.

Ro’s article quotes researcher Olivier Sandre: 

Sandre advises students to be cautious with unfamiliar conferences, advising them to attend established ones at which they can be confident about making useful contacts. ... Now that he is more selective about which conferences he attends, he’s particularly wary of those run by businesses rather than learned societies. It’s fine when companies arrange practical services, such as meals, but he feels that the scientific content needs to be decided on by scientists. If he does not recognize the name of a single member of the organizing committee, he’s doubtful that the conference will be a good one.

In other words, conferences are about building a trusted community.

The bottom line from both articles:

Conference experiences are often a mixed bag. But understanding the potential and limitations of a conference ahead of time can help to manage expectations and assess the value of attending, even if it requires quite a bit of upfront research.

One resource mentioned is the “Think. Check. Attend.” website. It seems nice enough. I would also search for the conference on social media and look for whether people you trust have been to an earlier version of the conference. Searching the Flaky Academic Conferences blog might also be a useful tool, although I wish it was updated more regularly.

References

Ro C. 2024. How to spot a predatory conference, and what science needs to do about them: a guide. Nature 632: 219-220. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02360-2

Ro C. 2025. How to know whether a conference is right for you. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00903-9 

External links

Think. Check. Attend. 

Flaky Academic Conferences (blog - not updated in a long time)

Sweet sixteen

Almost missed blogiversary month!

It’s always a little crazy to think how this one project, started almost on a whim spinning off from my general academic blog, has managed to keep going.

I thank you for you continued interest and attention. I know I have slowed on posts, but make no mistake, I have every intention of keeping this project going for many more years yet.

I’m always looking for posters to share on the blog! I.ve you’ve done a conference poster you are happy with – or one you want to share as a warning to others – please email me at BetterPosters@gmail.com!

 

Photo by Michael W. May on Flickr; used under a Creative Common license.