Review: Creating Effective Conference Abstracts and Posters in Biomedicine: 500 Tips for Success

I started this blog back in 2009. But unbeknownst to me, a trio of authors published a book about conference posters around the same time. Somehow, Creating Effective Conference Abstracts and Posters in Biomedicine escaped my notice for all these years! Why did nobody tell me? Goodness knows I looked for books on this topic when I started blogging.

In many ways, this book is similar to mine: a “walk through” of advice on the poster presentation experience, from initial planning to presentation.

Chapters 2 through 5 cover conference abstracts, and Chapters 6 through 21 – more than three-quarters of the book! – are about posters. So this really is a conference posters book, much more than the title lets on. 

It’s not clear why the book title mentions biomedicine specifically. The advice here is widely applicable to any academic conference.

The style of the book is literally a series of tips. Most pages have about three or four headings, with a brief paragraph – sometimes a few – under each. This has the advantage of making the book skimmable, but can also make it harder to get into reading flow.

The book’s biggest shortcoming is that there are almost no illustrations. This is fine for the chapters on abstracts, but baffling for the chapters on poster creation. There are a few examples of posters way back at the very end of the book, tucked away in appendices. The poster examples are mundane and don’t get much explanation of why they are showcased.

This is touted as an example of a “creatively designed landscape poster.”

I wouldn’t have counted as cutting edge poster design – even in 2009.

I generally agree with most of the advice here. I do disagree with a few things, like, “Put most of the text in bullet points.” They also lean too much into templates for my taste.

The book references online resources in several places, but because the book is more than ten years old now, there is a lot of link rot. Even the author’s home page, shown early on, has succumbed to link rot. Likewise, many specific suggestions on how to do things in PowerPoint 2007 seem quaint, even if the you would do it the same way in modern PowerPoint. But overall, the book has aged well. Most of the advice is still solid.

When gearing up to write my book, one of my incentives was that I didn’t think a book like Creating Effective Conference Abstracts and Posters in Biomedicine existed! If I knew of this book, would I have written mine? I think so. This book has solid advice, but the lack of illustrations and example, plus that it has “aged out” a bit, left space for a new book on the topic.

Reference

Fraser J, Fuller L, Hutber G. 2009. Creating Effective Conference Abstracts and Posters in Biomedicine: 500 Tips for Success. CRC Press. https://www.routledge.com/Creating-Effective-Conference-Abstracts-and-Posters-in-Biomedicine-500/Fraser-Fuller-Hutber/p/book/9781846193118