I bring this up here because there will be sessions on conference accessibility that I had a small role in planning. Part of those sessions will be talking about how we can make the poster session experience better for people with accessibility needs.
The conference agenda is available. Look for “Making Meetings Better for All” for a brief description of this session.
Today’s contribution is from Alexandra Millhuff. Click to enlarge!
This poster combines a few elements of the billboard style with a more common three column layout. It’s certainly better than many of its competitors, with more graphics and fewer words. But I think there is room to push it even further in readability and focusing attention.
First, I wanted to clear up the title bar.
The logo on the left was causing two problems. First, it drew attention away from the title, because it was in the critical top left corner, where experienced readers of English naturally look first. It grabs even more attention because of the high contrast white box and red letters.
The other problem was that although the title and authors are aligned to the centre of their text box, they aren’t centrally aligned with the page overall. It’s been pushed to the right to make space for the logo on the left. This destroys the symmetry that you want in centre aligned text.
I moved the title and authors to the right. I found an all white version of the university logo that got rid of the box and matched the rest of the title bar. The logo is a little smaller, which allowed me to put all of the author info on one line. This creates a little more white space, which helps make the title the focus of the title bar.
Next, I cleaned up the columns.
I got rid of bullets because they were adding visual clutter. Unless your text is an actual list in a longer section of text, you are better off without bullets.
There were two alignment issues. Some of the text boxes in the columns on the left and right didn’t align. Here is a close up of the left column, with a vertical line drawn down the page. Notice how the bullets are just to the right of the line in the top text box, sit on the line in the middle box, and are to the left of the line in the bottom box.
When you create a text box in PowerPoint, it adds white
space around the text by default. This doesn’t matter if you only have
text lining up with text. But if you want text to line up next to
anything else, the text will be misaligned with other objects. Click to
enlarge!
Here
is how you fix that problem in PowerPoint. You have to manually change
the margins to zero. Under “Shape format,” expand the sidebar. Fine the
“Text options” tab and set the margins to zero.
The result of those changes:
Next, I moved the main graphic from the middle to the right. This is one of those decisions that I think some people might disagree with. They might argue that these are results, and so the logical place to put them is after the “Study design” section in the left-hand column.
It is true that the graphic show results, but in practice on this poster, it is acting more as a summary for the project. I say this because it has a big sentence at the top – set in even large point size than the title! And there is no “Results” heading above the graphic.
The problem with a placing a big summary graphic in the middle is that it breaks the reading flow. By moving it to the left, it emphasizes that this is the big take-home message. The title and this graphic clearly get signalled as the most important things on the poster.
Next, , I did some more text editing and repositioning. I aligned the take-home sentence above the infographic with the title. I edited the text throughout to make it shorter, and adjusted the position of the text boxes accordingly. These edits included the the message above the graphic, but that will change again...
I continued to look for places to make cuts.
I made another possibly controversial decision: I got rid of the references. The reason for cutting it out was that the references weren’t referenced. That is, there was no place in the main text they were mentioned. They were functioning more like a “For further reading” suggestion than citations.
I noted
that in the graphic, every factor shown had a p value underneath
it. And they were all exactly the same p value! Rather than saying the same p value seven times, I cut those and noted the p values in a sentence underneath the graphic.
Lastly, I made some more adjustments to the central graphic. I tried to make the circles more evenly spaced.
Also, I reworded the top take home message. I realized “older women” was inaccurate, because there were two separate risk factors. I had tried to condense too much.
I ran this last version past Alexandra to confirm that my various edits to the text hadn't changed the meaning from what she intended.
Here’s the changes in a movie:
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.
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
ConfIDent platform (see especially FAQ on requesting a conference ID)
ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences (blog post)
ConfIDent project (completed 2022)
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.
Critique: Italian cemeteries
Analyzing the Vaquero logo, or: Who was that tanned man?
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.
Thanks to Billy Wade, an undergraduate with Dr. Stephanie Grella at Loyola Chicago. Thank you, Billy, for giving us something to smile about!
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.
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!
Caroline O’Donnell on LinkedIn
I was listening to a podcast recently, and heard this:
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.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.
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!
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
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
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:
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:
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.
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
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?”
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.
That’s right, I totally forgot to mention that this project clocked 15 years last month!
.jpg)
Picture from Wikimedia Commons.
The big story on science social media last week was this figure:
No, it doesn’t make any sense, and that’s because it was made with generative AI. The authors disclosed this, as journal policy required them to do. The paper has two more figures that are also AI generated and also wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong.
The paper is retracted, but you can find the figures in Elizabeth Bik’s blog.
When something like this happens, the automatic outcry from scientists is, “How did this get published?”
The publisher releases the names of peer reviewers for its articles, and one reviewer did flag problems with the figures. As far as I know, the editor has not explained why the criticisms raised by one reviewer were not seen as worth acting on. A representative from the publisher says they are investigating.
The simple moral of the story? Don’t use generative AI to make scientific figures.
But there is a more subtle and more general lesson about research culture that the other reviewer’s comments reveal.
A journalist from Vice’s tech reporting site, Motherboard, wrote to one of the article’s peer reviewers and asked what was up. The reply is informative (emphasis added):
(T)he paper’s U.S.-based reviewer, Jingbo Dai of Northwestern University... said that it was not his responsibility to vet the obviously incorrect images. ...
“As a biomedical researcher, I only review the paper based on its scientific aspects. For the AI-generated figures, since the author cited Midjourney, it's the publisher's responsibility to make the decision,” Dai said. “You should contact Frontiers about their policy of AI-generated figures.”
I think that’s a very revealing statement. The reviewer doesn’t think a paper’s figures counts as part of the science. In this view, only the text counts.
Many people talking about this horrible figure on social media are clear that they think the reviewers should have reviewed the figures with the same critical eye as the text. But the underlying attitude that all scholarly knowledge should be contained entirely in text is deeply embedded in academia.
In a recent podcast (I think “This is what language means”
from Scholarly Communication podcast) talks about how the 19th century push for mass literacy privileged the written word. I think they gave spoken words as an example. Some academics have given famous lectures and seminars (I think Jacques Derrida was used as an example). But unless
those spoken works are captured somehow transcribed into books, they are not counted as important contributions.
Because this is a blog about visual communication, I’m arguing that “text first” culture is partly responsible for why academic graphics (including conference posters) are often poor. Scientific graphics are ultimately disposable.
We need to elevate the role of graphics in academics and push it closer to text in its importance.
Rats, responsibility, and reputations in research, or: That generative AI figure of rat “dck”
The Crustacean Society 2011: Day 3
[Retracted] Guo X, Dong L, Hao D, 2024. Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 11:1339390. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2023.1339390
Retraction notice for Guo et al.
Scientific journal publishes AI-generated rat with gigantic penis in worrying incident
Study featuring AI-generated giant rat penis retracted, journal apologizes
This is what language means – Scholarly Communication podcast
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)
