All in favour of puppies at conferences?

Brook Flammang posted this picture from the Ocean Science meeting.

She writes:

Every conference should have a puppy play zone.

 Seconded!

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.

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)

In search of an online and hybrid poster session that works

Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of discussions about conference accessibility and online conferences. The advantages of online conferences became almost immediately apparent in 2020, when the pandemic quickly forced the issue. Since then, many conferences have stepped back from the online experience, which I think is a shame.

I think there is still room to innovate! A recent paper by Moss and colleagues (2024) steps up to the challenge of how to make a large hybrid conference. And by large, we’re talking about over 2,600 participants, with 600 online.

Poster session has seemed to be the one part of a conference that has proved hardest to translate into a positive online experience.

Here’s how this team did their poster session:

An example of (freedom to experiment) was the hybrid poster set-up where online and in-person presenters and participants could interact freely in real time via Zoom. When it became clear that existing commercial providers could not realize this vision in a cost-effective way, a custom approach was devised that involved purchasing 100 sets of equipment, managed by the (organizing committee) and a dedicated set of volunteers. The physical set-up was fairly straightforward, incorporating digital screens, Raspberry Pis, mice, keyboards, webcams and ethernet connections. While this experimental approach was not without challenges, it successfully enabled hybrid posters in an unprecedented and innovative way.

I would have liked to hear from conference attendees about their poster experience. Did they feel it was close to a face-to-face session? Was it easy to navigate? Were there genuine interactions from both the in person and online attendees?

Regardless, I commend the organizers for their generosity:

This approach also led to a sustained and lasting impact on the community: because the equipment sets were purchased outright rather than rented, they are being donated to schools across South Africa, bringing benefits to people well beyond the (conference) and facilitating educational opportunities that would have otherwise been inaccessible.

Now, you might read that and think, “Wait, they bought all this equipment for the poster sessions for use at one conference? Surely that was a money loser for this conference!” The authors don’t think so:

(N)o more than 18% of the total conference costs can be in any way attributable to online attendees (but) this is a substantial overestimate, as (audio-visual) equipment is necessary for all participants, not just those online. When removing (audio-visual) costs from the calculation, hybrid costs were only 3% of the budget — considering that online registration covered 6% of the total budget, it is likely that IAU more than broke even with its online registrations. ...

Far from adding excessively to conference costs, the experience of the IAU GA demonstrates that hybrid can greatly increase reach (for instance, more than 10,000 unique viewers on YouTube) for a small fraction of the conference budget.

It can be done, and it can be done better. I would very much like to see more organizations pushing harder to develop a great online poster session.

Reference

Moss VA, Venugopal R, Govender K, Hotan AW, Kobayashi R, Rees GA, Tasker EJ, Vertue DG, Le Jeune A, Kerrison EF, Roux J, Blumenthal K, Ekers RD, Peel MW, Takalana CM, Barocci-Faul S, Benkhaldoun Z, Binneman A, Breytenbach H, Chibueze JO, Cunnama DC, Kubheka DV, Mdhluli JE, Macfarlane SA, Zamxaka M, van Zyl L. 2024. Accessible hybrid conferences are possible and affordable at large scale. Nature Astronomy: in press. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02448-9
 

Poster sessions may reflect scientific progress more accurately than the peer-reviewed literature

 I was listening to a podcast recently, and heard this:

In an analysis of more than 300,000 scientific conference presentations, informal posters or talks that scientists often endeavour to turn into papers, fewer than 40% were published in peer-reviewed journals, and negative or null findings were far less likely to be published than positive results.

I dug up the article this was referring to, and it was one I read before (Scherer et al. 2018). It’s cited the Better Posters book^*. The fact doesn’t surprise me, because the “file drawer problem” of selective publication has been known for decades. But hearing it in this context prompted a new thought.

Conference posters may represent the most accurate view of the progress of science available.

I contend this is kind of important. There is a huge amount of effort that goes into cataloguing and analysing peer-reviewed journal articles. There is an entire research field now of bibliometrics and industries built on providing data about scientific journal articles. 

And people have this expectation that the scientific literature should be “pure.” There are a lot of tears shed and many grumbling posts about the “pollution” of the peer-reviewed literature by incorrect studies, low-quality studies, and now generative AI. Listen for it, and you’ll hear the metaphors about cleanliness and purity come up all the time with regards to journal articles.

Why is there so much concern about that we know that the publication process filters results in a biased way? Biased towards statistically significant results, unexpected results, and so on.

I am not saying that all results are equally interesting to working professionals or that every data point is sacred. There is already too much scientific information in many fields for people to stay on top of everything, and filtering is not only necessary, but valuable.

But what I’m talking about here are specifically people who are interested in the big pictures, the trends. For instance, you might want to know not only what people say is working, but what people can’t get to work, no matter how many labs are trying. 

This is another reason why archiving conference posters matters, and why we should treat posters are part of the scientific record rather than ephemera.

* Still available and I’d love it if you got a copy or asked your library to get a copy!

References

Scherer RW, Meerpohl JJ, Pfeifer N, Schmucker C, Schwarzer G, von Elm E. 2018. Full publication of results initially presented in abstracts. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (11): MR000005. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.MR000005.pub4

External links

Audio long read: So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it? (podcast version)

So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it? (print version)

Picture from Origin of the Texas Sharpshooter

A great conference poster is worth $1,000

Okay, the title of this post is a fib.

A great conference poster is worth $910. On average.

After talking about poster competitions on podcasts (like the Hello PhD podcast episode on “How to win a poster competition”), I started wondering just how much someone could get for winning a poster competition in cold hard cash dollars. 💰

So I started googling for things like “conference poster prize.” I stopped at 20, because I thought that gave a good enough sense of the range for a blog post.

And $910 was the average cash prize from my sample.

The top prize I found with my quick searching was $3,000. Three grand seems a pretty sweet reward for a poster.

Because I was searching for cash prizes specifically, you may argue that the average cash prize in inflated because lots of conferences do not have cash prizes for posters, so there should be a lot of zeroes in the data set.

Any the data aren’t normally distributed. A few high value prizes are pulling up the mean.

One of the lessons from this exercise is that conferences that are offering no cash prize, or a couple of hundred dollars, need to step up their game.

But I am curious. Have I already found the high end for prizes? Are there any conferences were someone gets a $5,000 cheque for the best poster? So I am crowdsourcing this question! If you are going to a conference with a “Best poster” competitions, please take a few minutes to fill out this form!

Submission for conference poster prizes (Google form)

External links

Poster prize data set

Cell Bio 2023

How it started:

How it’s going:

Second photo from https://x.com/lenakumba/status/1731423282228867322

Can you give the same poster twice? And should you?

Don’t let the “Twitter is dying” talk stop you, there are still many valuable discussions on the bird site!

Luisa Turbino Torres asked if people thought it was okay to present the same poster twice at conferences.

People had... opinions. They ranged close to a full 180­° from, “Sure, totally okay” to “That’s misconduct!”

Turbino Torres summarized the responses in this thread. Here is an edited excerpt:

Short answer: it depends.

Social sciences use conferences to workshop ideas in different stages. Other fields present ready-to-publish research (that is often officially published in conference proceedings).

If you present something that is in progress, as long as there is progress (i.e., posters are similar, not identical. - ZF), it should be okay to present at another one. But if you present a final draft that just needs a few tweaks before publishing, it seems less productive.

It is not a bad idea to present (a poster) in more than one space because you are making your work known and disseminating it to different audiences. If you do interdisciplinary work, it seems okay and desirable to present to different audiences.

(But) maybe don’t present the exact same abstract at the exact same conference in a consecutive year. Some conferences ask you not have presented the same abstract previously (emphasis added). 

Some institutions and organizations might not fund the same abstract twice. But they might only check the title or actually check the abstract, it depends on the institution.

The best advice I got from this from Keith Schnakenberg: “You should keep presenting the same paper until the comments are almost all predictable and then you can submit the paper.”

TL;DR: Familiarize yourself with the unspoken rules of your discipline and department / institution (by asking a mentor or advisor, for example), but do not be too attached to them.

I discuss this in the Better Posters book. Chapter 25 begins with a short section on “Encore presentations” (pages 248-249). I wrote that reusing the exact same identical poster is not ideal. It’s good to be up front about it if you do.

Since we are coming up on the holiday season, this is a good time for me to remind you that the Better Posters book makes a great addition to your wishlist or your giving list!

Public health in poster sessions

I have been freaking out a little over seeing people posting pictures from in person conferences and seeing very few masks.

I got thinking about this, and realized that good design can not only help address public health concerns, but will make things better in many other ways.

For poster presenters

Using very big text on your poster so that it can be read from two to three meters away:

• Forces you to focus on using only your key content.
• Makes your work more accessible to people with low vision. 👓
• Lets people socially distance and helps to keep everyone from getting sick with an airborne infectious disease! 🦠

 Being able to give a concise summary of your poster:

• Respects other peoples’ time. ⌚
  
• Allows more time for questions and conversations.
• Reduces potential pathogen exposure time and helps to keep everyone from getting sick with an airborne infectious disease! 🦠

If you want to take a picture of yourself by your poster, take two. 

Take one without a mask 😀 that you can share with friends and family and put in your personal scrapbook.

Take one with a mask 😷 that you post on social media to show that you publicly that you are a classy person who cares about the health and well being of your colleagues. 

For conference organizers

Using one poster per board instead of two per board, using larger poster boards, and increasing the distance between rows of poster boards:

• Makes the poster session more accessible for wheelchair users.🧑‍🦽
• Makes the poster session more accessible for people with service animals. 🐕‍🦺 
• Lets people socially distance and helps to keep everyone from getting sick with an airborne infectious disease! 🦠

Asking participants to hang posters early and scheduling more poster viewing time:

• Give people more opportunities to see all the posters they want.
• Gives more time for people to think of questions and have deeper conversations.
• Reduces number of people in poster session room at any time, lets people socially distance and helps to keep everyone from getting sick with an airborne infectious disease! 🦠

Final thought...

What you take away from a conference should be new ideas, plans for projects, a renewed excitement about your research field, and maybe a few business cards. 📇

What you take from a conference should not be an infectious disease with a one in 20 chance of long term health problems. 🤧

Conference dress codes, or, “Twitter outrage of the day”

Making the rounds on Twitter today an image of a dress code for a physics conference. Here’s the top result as I write this. Click to enlarge.

The top tweet from David Smith calls it, “the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.”

Now, as someone who became an academic precisely because I hated the thought of wearing ties, I get it. I get the resistance to policing appearance. I get the social media outrage that this image has generated.

But here’s the original image from the conference website. While the image above has the conference website embedded in it, the website is printed a bit small, and a lot of tweets (including the top one) did not include a clickable link in the tweet.

Notice that the image has been cropped. It’s missing its top half.

The full image appears to show two points that seem pertinent to the discussion (if I understand correctly).

1. This code applies only to the opening ceremony.
2. A member of the host country’s royal family is attending: Her Royal Highness Maha Chakri Sirindhorn.
   

So perhaps the conference organizers are not being the super strict fashion police that the cropped image suggests? And this kind of feels like a manufactured controversy?

Whatever you may think of royalty, people are usually expected to act in a particular way around political leaders. A certain level of formality is expected.

If a head of state or someone in a similar position were coming to an academic conference (maybe even strolling through a poster session!), would it be reasonable for the conference organizers to require their attendees dress a particular way? For example, “No sweat pants,” “No sandals,” “Shirts with buttons for men,” or what have you?

I am currently running a couple of polls about this on Twitter, so will update this when I have results.

It’s also worth noting that this kerfuffle about a dress code is happening in a country that is not mostly white and anglo.

Update: Poll results are mixed and seem to be sensitive to exact phrasing. When I asked if it's okay for organizers to put in a dress code if there was a visiting head of state during a poster session, most said “No.” When I asked if there was a head of state visiting your lab, most said they would dress up.

Petra Boyton tweeted what may be a good summary:

- dress codes are important
- we don't discuss researcher clothing in the context of respect, dignity, accessibility, inclusion and safety enough
- this area is more complex than we know and deserves more attention
- you are fabulous whatever you're wearing #ResearchTip

Online conferences offer many benefits, but online poster sessions still suck

Since 2020, most academic conferences have been online. A recent paper on conferences found many positive effects from online conferences. In short:

• More people overall.
• People from more places.
  
• More women.

The paper argues that online conferences also reduced carbon footprint, but do this by calculating carbon emissions of air travel only. They do not calculate the carbon emissions from hosted server space, energy use of uploads and downloads, and so on. As blockchain technology has proved, “digital” does not mean “carbon neutral.”

The paper highlights the problems with online poster sessions in the abstract: “(F)urther development of virtual networking features and poster sessions is necessary to achieve widespread adoption and acceptance of this new format.”

A dive into the main text shows a more complex picture.

Skiles and company go into more details in this excerpt, lightly edited (acronyms removed):

Analysed virtual conferencess had poster authors publish their posters via Twitter, using a web-based iPoster sharing platform, or by uploading a 5-minute prerecorded presentation to the conference website. The poster presentations had high view counts (NAMS iPosters had on average 142 views) but presenters could not tell how many attendees were viewing their posters and features for communicating with poster viewers were not effective. In contrast, Twitter-based poster sessions are increasing in frequency and allow asynchronous communication. However, Twitter is not available in every country, limiting access. Consequently, virtual posters were less popular, with 85% of North American Membrane Society survey respondents and 43% of Photonics Online Meetups 2 survey respondents indicating that they preferred in-person poster sessions to virtual poster sessions.

So they present a sample size of two, with an even split on preference. One crowd preferred face-to-face poster sessions, the other preferred online poster sessions. The “preferred” margin for online poster sessions is smaller in one meeting than the other, but still. I’m amazed that one conference had more than half of respondents favouring online poster sessions.

References

Skiles M, Yang E, Reshef O, Muñoz DR, Cintron D, Lind ML, Rush A, Calleja PP, Nerenberg R, Armani A, M. Faust K, Kumar M. 2021. Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2

Posters from before they were famous: A dream project

 Recognize the woman below? (It might be easier if you’re American.)

It’s federal politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, eleven years before she was elected to the American House of Representatives in 2018. When she was in high school, Ocasio-Cortez was a second place finisher in her category in the 2007 International Science and Engineer Fair.

Yes, technically she is not presenting a poster, she is presenting a tri-fold. But I will let it go to make my point.

Lots of people present posters at conferences. Some of them go on to become better known than the average student. 

Ocasio-Cortez is unusual but not alone in being a politcian in her science background. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a scientific career. Before that, Margaret Thatcher did an undergraduate chemistry dissertation.

I once spotted a poster co-authored by filmmaker James Cameron (whose interest in deep sea exploration is well known; pretty sure he only contributed samples and was not involved in making the poster).

Many well-known scientists have probably given posters at some point in their careers, too. Nobel prize winners have given posters. Science communicators who write books and appear on late-night talk shows have given posters. You know, the “rock star” scientists.

I wonder if Carl Sagan ever gave a poster.

I would love a project that showed these people with their posters. I would love to hear them talk about their poster session experiences. I would love to show students, “Look, what you’re doing is something that even science ‘celebrities’ did. They made posters, too.”

External links

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a prestigious science-fair prize for research involving free radicals

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez puts Yorktown Heights on the map 

Intel ISEF alumna headed to Capitol Hill

 

You’d miss serendipty if poster sessions went away

I miss the art of record flipping. When music was released on vinyl, flipping through albums in bins was part meditative in its rhythm combined with occasional rushes of pure joy when you found something you were looking for, or, better yet, didn’t even know existed. That new album by a favourite artist.

(Even shopping for CDs wasn’t as good as albums. The CDs were clunkier and noisier than albums.)

I was reminded of this almost lost art when I recently stumbled across an album released seven years ago that I would have bought seven years ago – if only I knew it existed.

I love the portability of digital media, but digital media is often kind of terrible at those lucky discoveries. The things you see and instantly want in your life.

We are in the middle of a year of most academic conferences being postponed or cancelled. This preprint argues that it’s probably a good thing: they advocate moving most conferences online because of the carbon costs of traveling. (See also here.).

A couple of weeks ago, I pondered whether the poster format was right for online meetings. This prompted the question of whether posters are right for regular meetings. After all, lots of people don’t like the poster format, so it’s a fair question of what we’d miss if you took the poster session away.

What poster sessions do better than multiple tracks of slide talks or other formats is create serendipitous opportunities to learn and meet new people.

In my experience, abstract books or online collections (like the one #TAGC20 has on Figshare) do not facilitate browsing. You tend to perform very targeted searches instead for specific people you know or topics that are relevant to you.

I wondered if this was just me, so I asked this question on Twitter.

Do you discover new people and projects at poster sessions in conferences that you probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise (searching abstracts, etc.)?

Well over 80% of respondents (71 votes) said this happened to them.

Response	Percent
Often	53.50%
Sometimes	35.20%
Rarely	8.50%
Never	2.80%

So before we rush to get rid of poster sessions for live conferences, or as we develop alternatives for poster sessions in online settings, it’s worth asking: how can we facilitate the lucky accidents that happen in convention center hallways and hotel event rooms all the time?

Related posts

Are posters right for online meetings? Thoughts from The Allied Genetic Conference virtual poster session #TAGC20

External links

Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements
Comment on “Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements”

Pronouns on posters

My given name (Zen) is an ambiguous gender signal. I know both men and women with the same first name as me. I understand that other people often want to know someone’s gender, and that people may want to explictly state how they like being referred to.

For those reasons and others, some conferences have started adopting the practice of putting pronouns on conference badges. The point is to try to reinforce that different people might have different ways they want to be addressed, thereby creating a more welcoming environment to all.

Nelson Stauffer suggests extending this practice to posters.

Approach to pronouns on a poster? Just add more superscript characters.

Nelson tweeted this image as an example.

I’m not crazy about this particular implementation of the idea, because the symbols that Nelson used (a dagger and a double dagger) are hard to distinguish in this particular font, particularly at small size.

Is this a good idea more generally?

Probably.

Adding pronouns adds visual complexity. You have to match the symbols, the pronouns, and the names, and do a dance back and forth between the three for each author. That’s a lot of cognitive load to ask someone to take on in a busy poster session.

The suggestion here is to put the symbols and pronouns in the title bar, part of the poster which can be overloaded with authors’ names and affiliations.

A good general rule in graphic design is, “Put information at the point of need.” People are most likely to want to know preferred pronouns when they are having a conversation with someone. That makes an excellent case for putting pronouns on name tags because if you can read someone’s name tag, you’re close enough to be having a conversation with that person.

If pronouns are already on name tags, putting pronouns on the poster is duplicate information. If pronouns are not on name tags, the argument for putting those pronouns on the poster is much stronger.

Similarly, adding pronouns for the poster presenter makes a lot of sense. Again, knowing pronouns can be valuable when you are conversing with someone, which is most likely when you are speaking to a presented.

Adding the pronouns for all presenters may be overkill. If you have a poster with a long author list, there may be many authors who are not at the conference at all. So on the one hand, adding pronouns for all authors is consistent. On the other hand, are the pronouns of all the individuals participating in a project – who may or may not be at the conference – something that a viewer needs at that moment?

Some authors may not want their preferred pronouns on the poster. Authors who are not at a conference may not want to disclose something about their pronoun use to everyone in attendance.

Some people have argued for going in the opposite direction (more with scientific papers than posters) on pronouns. That is, some prefer to display only initials rather than given names to downplay gender and minimize bias. Many women writers (like Star Trek’s Dorothy Fontana) used their initials for their author credit for this reason.

If you want to include pronouns, many of the tips regarding showing institutional affiliations might be helpful here.

Related posts

Showing authorship on posters

Psychology teaching poster conference on Twitter

The Society for the Teaching of Psychology is the latest organization to hold a poster session on Twitter.

It will run 1-2 November, using the hashtags #stp19poster and #stp19thread.

You can pre-register, but it isn’t required to present. (I mean, you can tweet whatever you want.)

I have previously written about making posters just for Twitter here.

Related posts

Top tips for Twitter posters

External links

STP’s International Twitter Poster Conference (ITPC)

Freedom to change from your abstract

Jennifer Rohn asked:

Academic STEM Twitter: how far have you ever strayed from your submitted abstract when it comes time to write the talk or create the poster? Or turn it around: if you went to a talk/poster and the presenter included extra information/some tangents, would this bother you?

For me, the real question is not whether people can or should change or add content, but why it happens so rarely.

In the world of academic conferences, abstracts are usually written months in advance. 

• The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology abstract deadline was 4 September, and the meeting will be held 3 January, which is four months away.
• The Society for Neuroscience abstract deadline was 3 May, and the meeting starts 19 October. That’s five months out.
• The American Geophysical Union abstract deadline was 31 July for a 9 December meeting. Also five months out.

With that much time between when the abstract is submitted, it should be no surprise that you may have learned a few things since the abstract was submitted. You may have collected new data. You may have completed an analysis. You may have changed your mind.

Because there are no poster police, there is no reason to limit yourself to what was on the abstract. 

The only thing that I can see a small reason for keeping the same is the title. People who are looking for a poster with a particular title might be confused if the title bore no resemblance to the original. But if the deep structure of the topic is the same, reworking the title should be okay.

Change whatever you need.

Poster vandalism

In part of a discussion about authorship and ownership of projects, Keira Lucas mentioned this anecdote:

I had a previous disgruntled employee crumble up one of my biologist’s poster at a conference because he felt entitled to the data.

Coincidentally enough, this was one day after I heard a story about a presenter who had a poster that was stolen during the conference.

I was gobsmacked. Stealing a poster? Why? I mean, a conference poster isn’t exactly a Monet.

And the morals of the story are:

Conference organizers should have some sort of security plan in case people behave badly.

Conference organizers should have some plan to help people recover from disasters. This can be as simple as asking if there is a large format printer at the conference site or nearby.

Third, conference presenters should have a digital version of their poster that is accessible to them. This might be on a flash drive, on a tablet, laptop, emailing a copy to themselves, a cloud storage service like OneDrive or Dropbox, and many other ideas.

Update, 19 August 2019: A poster was defaced at the 2019 Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. A PDF of the report provides some details. I’ve removed the name of the faculty member from this post because it’s irrelevant to the point.

There were rumors... that [a faculty member] had bullied a postdoc (originally reported as a student) into changing his poster. After reviewing the discussion with the poster presenter and a witness, this was determined to not be the case. In fact, the presenter was upset to find out that these false rumors had begun and has sought to bring the facts to the Ombud. The postdoc’s poster was indeed later defaced by others, but [the faculty member] had nothing to do with this incident, and was not even present when it happened.

While this statement is intended to “clear the air”, it could be improved. There is no way to know from the PDF which meeting this is about (by which I mean the year), or when the PDF was created. So someone who stumbles across it would have no way of knowing if this was last week or years ago.

Hat tip to David Shiffman.

Related posts

Poster sessions are not singles bars

#RSCposter 2018

The hashtag #RSCposter is short for, “Royal Society of Chemistry poster,” and it blew up on science Twitter this week. This was a seriously organized event, with rules as comprehensive as I’ve seen for some in person conferences.

Organizer Edward Randviir explains (lightly edited):

The goal of this is to provide a new innovative conferencing format that takes advantage of modern social media... We also wanted to gives presenters a free platform to present and discuss their work, and encourage particularly young researchers to participate in academic discourse to build their confidence. Twitter was the most appropriate social media platform. Many professionals across a range of sectors use Twitter for professional purposes, unlike Facebook or other social media outlets. Twitter limits the discussion to 280 characters, which challenges participants to be concise while communicating key messages from their work.

This was the fourth time the Society had done this, but it was the first time I’d noticed. Edward explained that the first two years (2015, 2016) had about 80 people contributing (using the hashtag #RSCAnalyticalPoster). It expanded in 2017 to none areas of chemistry, and participation jumped to about 220 posters. “Following on from that success,” Edward continued, “we brought in chemical engineering this year. With help from several Royal Society of Chemistry journals, we have seen participation increase again by around 12%. We hope to grow the event further in the future.”

Tweeting posters presents its own particular problems. Twitter is a mobile phone app at heart (as much as Twitter tries to make it the “everything machine”), and mobile phones are small screens, not big poster boards. I was viewing posters on big desktop computer. Even with a fairly high resolution computer screen, I worried about whether people would dump posters meant to be printed 2 meters across into a tweet and that it would be too small to see.

Lucie Nurdin noticed one workaround:

Opening the poster into a new tab allows to zoom on it and have a high resolution image. Glad I figured that out!

To my surprise, most posters were readable. But alas, not all were. This poster by Jinchuan Yang, fell into the trap of not making the text big enough for a Tweet. Click to enlarge (or any subsequent poster).

Progyata Chakma mostly did okay on the right and middle columns, but some of the left hand text is too small to read.

This, from GKalqurashi, is another example of a poster that wasn’t readable on my desktop.

Most posters were readable on my desktop, although some were often barely so.

Another problem with tweeting a poster is that when you post an image on Twitter, it creates a preview image that is resized and cropped down. It used to be 440 × 220 pixels (a 2:1 aspect ratio) in landscape format (wider than tall). I’m not sure that’s still true, because I saw a lot of square preview images. And many people use clients other than Twitter.

Regardless, most posters I saw were not optimized for preview images. I saw lots of posters in portrait format (taller than wide), which no app I know uses for Twitter previews.

Because of the cropped previews, the poster’s title – the most important part of a poster – were often hidden. This problem was mitigated a little, because the tweet itself could serving the job the title usually does: to entice the passerby. (Or scrollerby, in this case).

Luke Wilkinson’s poster caught my eye by placing a cute robot right in the middle, where it will be seen despite how Twitter crops rectangular images. Placing it in a circle also helps break up the rectangle monotony that you get when faces with scrolling through lots of posters.

Yuanning Feng took advantage of the format to make an animated poster. This does not look as good here on the blog as the original tweet, because of the hoops I have to jump through to convert a *.gif posted to Twitter – which Twitter converts to a movie – back into a *.gif.

Feng’s animation seems to be getting him about three times as many “likes” as most posters.

But as of now, it seems one of the most popular posters was by Jo-Han Ng. (And once you visit that, check Errant Science’s riff on Ng’s poster!)

As I scrolled through #RSCposter, my overall impression was, “Oh, there are all the problems that I usually see on academic posters. Too much to read. Too many boxes, not enough white space. Photo backgrounds that make the main stuff hard to read. Colour overlead.”

“New bottles for old wine,” as the saying goes.

External links

Take part in a truly global scientific conference
RSC Twitter Poster Conference 2018

How many people will show up at your poster?

This Twitter thread by Laura Williams about poster presentations began:

83% expect 10 or fewer poster visitors at large meeting.

This reminded me of an unfinished project: a formula to estimate how many people you could expect at your poster.

This is how far I got:

My efforts were inspired by the Drake equation. The attendance at the meeting (N_r for number ) is the maximum possible number of people who can see your poster (V for viewers). Most of the rest of the terms in the equation are fractions that reduce attendance at your poster.

Looking back on this was, my favourite factor in this equation (mid right) was, “f_c = fraction (of attendees) more interested in coffee (than your poster).” And the postscript to that still makes me smile: “GEOLOGY f_b = beer.”

Geologists do love their beer, I’ve heard.

Picking up the tab

I’m stepping a bit away from the poster board this week, so to speak, to talk about conference etiquette more generally. Conferences involve travel and eating out, usually in locations that cater to a lot of tourists (e.g., San Diego, New Orleans, Washington, DC) and partially hosted by hotels that are normally catering to business class. Since most conference attendees are usually early career stage scientists, cost is an issue.

Amy Lynch-Biniek wrote:

Tenured profs at conferences: adopt a “grad students and adjuncts don’t pay” rule at dinner/bar. Some did this for student-me and I never forgot.

Kate Washington added:

I was once in a grad-student dinner group that got stiffed by tenured profs who skipped out; I never forgot that either.

In fairness, that would be rude behaviour from anyone, regardless of career stage.

Drugmonkey, however, noted:

I never assume that just because (someone is a) tenured prof = moneybags that can pick up $$$ dinner checks. Should be voluntary.

Angela Vergara supports that:

I do it as much as I can, but as a prof in a state school in California, my conference budget is usually tied.

There are several issues at play here. For instance, how many people are at the conference with the professor? There’s a big difference in the cumulative tab for one trainee and half a dozen of them.

Many institutions support student travel to conferences. If a student has a per diem food allowance for a conference, it seems a little excessive for a professor to absorb all of those expenses when there are other sources of money dedicated to keeping the student fed.

I’m a little baffled that the original tweet singles out tenured professors. A tenure-track professor is still probably making significantly more than any trainee. Indeed, thanks to salary compression and inversion, tenure-track professors may be making more than tenured ones.

A professor – regardless of career stage – is expected to be a team leader. A conference is a good opportunity for leaders to say, “Thanks for a job well done,” and a good meal or a few drinks at the pub are a welcome gift. Generosity is a good feature of team leaders.

External links

Tenured profs should pick up the check?