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?

• • • • •

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.

• • • • •

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.

A simple way to assess conference posters shows you can do better than the “wall of text”

A new paper by Khadka and colleagues has two interesting results.

The first interesting result mentioned in the title of the article is a relatively simple way to assess conference posters. They created following rubric (slightly modified):

	Rating
Category	Exemplary (4 points)	Acceptable (3 points)	Sub-par (2 points)	Poor (1 point)
Organization	Information clean straightforward, organized	Some left to be desired / better	Much left to be desired / better	Neither clean nor straightforward
Poster design and use of graphics	Visually helpful, eye catching, pleasant to eyes	Some left to be desired / better	Much left to be desired / better	Visually unpleasant
Wordy or busy	Not busy or wordy (easy to review / understand)	Slightly busy or wordy (some wordiness present but can be easily reviewed / understood)	Busy and / or wordy (majority was text, difficult to review quickly)	Very busy and / or wordy (full of text, some vague, some ambiguous)

The authors found that this relatively simple scoring system, the observer agreement was high (“nearly perfect”), suggesting that this method is reliably capturing people’s impressions of the posters. 

This tool has promise for:

• Poster presenters asking for others to quickly review their poster.
  
• Instructors who need a fast way to score a student’s poster submitted for a class.
  
• Conference organizers running poster competitions.

The problem was that there were only two observers tested, and they were two of the authors on this paper. They were no naïve raters who were given standard instructions, then set loose on a set of posters. More validation with a larger set of raters would inspire more confidence in this scoring method. I’d love to see some people from outside academia, and undergrad students, and professors use this tool and see how well they agreed.

The second interesting finding was that using this rubric, the so-called “traditional” poster (which I take to mean a three column poster with standard “Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion” sections) do not rate as highly as say, “billboard” style posters (introduced by Mike Morrison in his viral YouTube video). However, this may be a function of the categories chosen. When one of the categories literally says “Wordy,” the billboard style will automatically rater higher, because by design, it forces you to reduce the number of words.

I would also like to point out that this research about an assessment tool is in a pharmacology journal. This points to one of the challenges of working on conference posters: the research is fragmentary and scattered in places that are not obvious.

Reference

Khadka S, Holt K, Peeters MJ. 2024. Academic conference posters: Describing visual impression in pharmacy education. Exploratory Research in Clinical and Social Pharmacy 13: 100423. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcsop.2024.100423

Your conference poster should have less than one thousand words

One of the biggest realizations I have had in the time I have been writing this blog was that on average, people want to spend about five minutes at a poster.

If you are at the poster, you can develop and give some kind of summary of the poster that comes in under five minutes. 

But what if you are not there? How much text can you have on the poster that someone will look at it and think, “I can read that in about five minutes?”

I think the upper limit – a hard, difficult high end – is one thousand words.

A quick search suggests that people read at rates of a little over 200 words a minute. An overall average for all kinds of adults is estimated at 238 words a minute. 

Now, it gets more complicated. On the one hand, most people at an academic conference are skilled readers. You might expect them to read a little faster. University students are estimated to read at 250 words a minute. 

On the other hand, text text on conference posters is usually technical academic writing. You might expect that would slow the reading rater down. One estimate (no citation) is that people read technical works at 75 words a minute. You would only get through 375 words in five minutes at that rate.

If your poster is clearly written without any technical jargon, you might push the number of words into the high hundred.

If your poster is written more like a journal article, with jargon and acronyms, and all the typical style of academic prose, any word count above the mid-hundreds will probably frustrate readers.

If you can pull your word count down to maybe 300 or 350, you have the chance to pull in far more browsers who will think that they can get something out of your poster in five minutes.