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
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