Identifying conferences with ConfIDent, a persitent identifier for academic events

Books have ISBN. Articles have DOI. Authors have ORCID. Institutions have ROR. Until recently, conferences or events had nothing. But that started changing in the last couple of years (Franken et al. 2022).

The idea of serial numbers, or persistent identifiers (PIDs) as they are more commonly called today, is one of those boring but so useful bits of scientific infrastructure. They enable so much data collection that you can get a much clearer picture of trends in fields.

There is now a working identifier for events and conferences called ConfIDent. (Conference IDentification, I see what you did there. Well done, punsters.)

As someone who has been actively campaigning for people to take conference posters more seriously, I think this is an important step. I hope that with this sort of identifier, we could eventually start to answer questions like, how many posters and slide talks are given at conferences every year? How many works are eventually published in journals or elsewhere?

For individual posters, a DOI is the more appropriate identifier. If organizers don’t create DOIs for your poster, you can generate one by uploading your poster on services like Figshare or Zenodo.

If you are a conference organizer, I encourage you to give your next conference an identifier. Broadcast that to your members and tell them what it is and how to use it.

If you are a conference attendee, I encourage you to ask the organizers for the ConfIDent number of the event, share this blog post if they have no clue what that means, and list the ConfIDent number of events you attend in your CV.

Hat tip to Alice Meadows of MoreBrains for pointers here.

Reference

Franken J, Birukou A, Eckert K, Fahl W, Hauschke C, Lange C. 2022. Persistent identification for conferences. Data Science Journal 21(1): 11. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011

External links

ConfIDent platform (see especially FAQ on requesting a conference ID)

ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences (blog post)

ConfIDent project (completed 2022)

The delight is in the details

Being Canadian, of course I played and watched hockey, although in my case, it was extremely casual and not something I actively followed. But I’ve been watching the creation of the PWHL with interest. The league’s first season did something unusual: none of the teams had names. They were just called by the name of their city or state.

But a few weeks ago, we finally got team names! Here’s a look at the six team logos:

The graphic designers did a bang-up job, I think. And because this is the poster blog, there is a lesson I would like poster makers to think about.

Almost every team sport has numbers on the back of their shirts, tops, jerseys, guernseys, whatever they happen to be called in that particular sport. The PWHL jerseys have them too:

But I have never seen any other league do what the PWHL has done with their jerseys. Every number has a series of small icons running through them. This is the Toronto Sceptres’ jersey:

From a distance, it might look like a raindrop, but it’s an orb (I’ve seen it called the “orb of unity”) that has been pulled from the team logo. You can see the orb better in this close-up of the top of the team logo:

The player numbers for the Boston Fleet get waves, Montréal Victoire players get fleur-de-lis, and so on.

I love this. I love details that reward anyone who takes a slightly closer than usual look. Designers have a phrase for this: “surprise and delight.” If you search “design surprise delight,” you can find many essays about it importance.

Here’s an example of one such detail that appeared in the blog before: a detail hidden in a QR code. QR codes are a great place to put such details, because the code is deliberately quite robust: it can degrade quite a bit and still work.

Other places that you could put in some sort of detail?

Many people use section headings on their poster that follow the journal “IMRAD” format. The headings are often simple boxes of solid colour with one word in them. There is almost always some space for a little detail or two.

While I dislike bullets on posters in general, if you do have cause to use one, you could try some small icon (like the orb above!) instead of a true bullet.

I think there might also be some possibilities to try to take elements of a university logo and put them somewhere else in the poster besides the title bar.

But a skeptical reader might ask: “What’s in it for me?”

How does this help you, a conference presenter? Isn’t a detail, by definition, something that will get overlooked by most people? How will it help you get one more visitor at your poster?

The honest answer is: it might not help you get one more visitor at your poster. This isn’t a technique to get more people. It’s a technique to give those who do stop at your poster a an extra little reward, and one hopes, a better and more memorable experience.

Think of it this way: people at a research conference are inundated with information. They are going to be living in their heads for a few days during the meeting. There may not be all that many opportunities for them to smile at a little detail they spot on a poster. You’re giving your viewer a chance to have an emotion, and emotion is core to social connections. And social connections are the basis for professional connections.

Related posts

Critique: Italian cemeteries
Analyzing the Vaquero logo, or: Who was that tanned man?

Presenting to a pigeon

 

In big convention centers, it’s not unusual to find an interloper. Ben Filio wrote:

You’ve heard of presenting your research to a general audience now get ready for… pigeon #sfn2024

Little did he know.

 

The photo is a screenshot I spotted from Doc Becca on Instagram, but I think the original “presenting to a pigeon” video might be from Jiaxin Cindy Tu. Watch with sound up!

Additional, October 14, 2024: The presenter has been identified! 

Thanks to Billy Wade, an undergraduate with Dr. Stephanie Grella at Loyola Chicago. Thank you, Billy, for giving us something to smile about!

Palm-sized poster

Handouts of posters at conferences are not new. But handouts that are hand-sized, well... I haven’t seen that before.

Jake Wintermute shared this image, and wrote:

(T)his image makes me want to go to a conference where people exchange tiny posters with QR codes on the back to the full poster

While this might not be a viable conference format, I do think this could be a great networking tool. Most people make handouts the size of standard letter page. That’s still not very portable. Something like this – a bit bigger than a business card – is far more easily stashed in a purse, wallet, or pocket.

If you give it out before your poster session, it might be better than a business card because you are providing the potential viewer with a visual cue that will make it easier to remember as they walk through the aisles of the session.

Spin me right round like a record

I love papercraft on posters, and Caroline O’Donnell has used it cleverly on her poster.

While I have a still photo in this post, you probably should see the video on LinkedIn to get the full effect of this poster. (You can also watch the video on Twitter.)

People are always trying to find ways to get more data in a a posters limited space. By creating a spinning section, Caroline effective gets four graphs for the price of one – but without shrinking them to a quarter of the size!

Hat tip to Milton Tan!

External links

Caroline O’Donnell on LinkedIn

O’Flaherty Lab 

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

Link roundup for August 2024

It’s been a minute on the blog! I haven’t finished with this project, just been busy!

Shira Joudan writes about the transition from attending conferences as a trainee to attending as a supervisor:

I tried to remember what I didn’t know before attending my first conference and tried to be clear about how things work. Even though I am not that old, I sometimes forget what it is like to do some of these things for the first time, so I am sure I didn’t cover it all. I edited abstract drafts, explained what sessions at conferences are (and which were appropriate fits!), and then, eventually, we held practice presentations. I instructed poster presenters to expect interruptions and to try to prepare a quick explainer of their poster — and reassured them that preliminary results are completely acceptable at this meeting.

 What are your best suggestions for a new supervisor taking students to a conference for the first time?

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Wolfe and Reineke provide user testing research on poster design. And it provides evidence to something I have been saying for years: Abstracts on posters are not necessary!

(T)he traditional, abstract format was rated as less usable than the other two formats and was the least preferred format. The sentence heading (without abstract) and #BetterPoster format were  rated equivalently in terms of usability and preference.

You may need a library subscription to read this one.

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Here is a gallery of posters from the International Statistical Literacy Project. Lots of interesting posters to browse. I am, for instance, curious if this poster from Mongolia is truly meant to be printed and mounted on a board: 

I haven’t seen many posters that tall and skinny. Hat tip to Yaning Wu!

• • • • •

Miguel Balbin talks about choosing the font size for your poster:

Body Text: 30-36 pt – Legible from about a metre away.

This is better than many, suggesting a size that is about 50% bigger than many others recommend. But I always recommend that if you can go bigger, go bigger.

• • • • •

Ching-Ye Tien finds students in Taiwan are very positive about digital poster formats. A “digital poster” is described as being on a large screen or projected, not just something presented in a Zoom call. The students list these pros of digital posters:

• Seen as environmentally friendly due to less paper use.
• Easy access to information. (Not sure how this is judged).
• Cheap and fast.
• Easy to create and modify the content.