publisher tips

Kaitlyn Werner is the winner of this month’s “Best re-use of a conference poster (beach edition)”: Alex Barnard took a poster into the third dimension with 3-D printing: This is not the first time I’ve shown a poster with a third dimension on this blog , but it’s still unusual enough to warrant a mention. Hat tip to Guanyang Zhang and Maslay Lab. Despite the tweet containing the #evol2016 hashtag, this poster was not at the Evolution 2016 meeting (I know, I saw them all), but I guess was similar to work presented at a talk there. Academic Poster on Twitter is worth a peek. The profile says, “This page is linked to the only academic poster expert blog on the internet.” I believe it’s referring to this page , since the account doesn’t link here. (This blog does appear under “ Helpful links .” Thank you – I try to be helpful whenever I can!) Lenny Teytelman reports on the European Bioinformatics Institute conference’s solution to, “Can I share this on social media?” They made cards y...

Earlier this week, I was at the 2016 Evolution meeting in Austin, Texas . The poster sessions ran for three nights, two hours a night, and I glanced at every single poster. The conference organizers underused their poster boards, as shown in the picture above. The instructions said that posters were supposed to be no wider than four feet, but the boards were probably seven or eight feet wide. This is a shame; I would have loved to use the whole space available. I wonder if the organizers were expecting more poster submissions. A few last minute posters were two to a board, and maybe they told people to keep posters small so they could double up on boards if necessary. But even if the conference organizers had told people they could make wider posters, I don’t think many people would have taken them up on it. I saw many posters in portrait format: very tall, skinny, and dangling off the bottom of the board. They looked awkward. I saw enough of them that I don’t think they resulted from...

How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says: (T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually. Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: “That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.” The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for “crayfish,” gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge): Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however. Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searc...