publisher tips

Mike Morrison has a 20 minute video describing what a poster session is and how to make a poster. Unlike Mike, however, I do not believe poster sessions are “holding the human race back in a non insignificant way.” The video, particularly the first half, is pessimistic about poster sessions. Around 13:25, good stuff starts to happen as Mike outlines a good poster design. I think he overestimates people’s willingness to snap pictures of QR codes, though. Mike has provided templates here , and is working on a study validating the design he has. He is looking for grad students to participate. You can email him at Mike.A.Morrison@gmail.com . Amy Burgain saw this video and offers this alternative : Amy writes: It achieves the clear simple message BUT emphasizes how that message is supported by the DATA. It keeps the goal of understanding how the conclusion is related to the data while also making it easier to glean main messages. I plan to have my own longer post about this in a couple of...

I’ve visited the issue of poster accessibility on this blog, but mainly in the context of visual issues, like colour blindness and dyslexia. Of course, these are not the only challenges the people might face attending a scientific conference. Amy-Charlotte Devitz, a.k.a. The Bendy Biologist on Twitter, has a great blog post talking about navigating a scientific conference in a wheelchair with a service dog. The conference at hand is the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting this month in Tampa, Florida. Here’s an excerpt, focusing in on what she says about poster sessions (emphasis added). 100+ posters were on display and you had a chance to interact with those who had made them. These were admittedly a bit of a challenge to navigate in a chair. It was crowded, meaning it was very hard to move around, and with so many people around I wasn’t able to get a proper look at many of the posters. The alternative was to come and look at the posters before the offic...

Today in, “Things I should not have to say.” A poster session is a place for exchange of scientific and technical information between professional adults. It is not a place for you to hit on people for a hook up or booty call. Beth Ann McLaughlin asked : Women of STEM, Quick question At any given science poster presentation, what percent of the time do you have a man at your poster who just won't go away and makes you uncomfortable? Results? 16% of women said every conference, 14% said 50-99% of them, 19% said 25-49% of them, and 51% of respondents said less than 25% of them. Now, sure I could niggle about the poll is structured might inflate perceptions of how common this is (there’s an option for 100%, but not 0%, so the most common situation could be women not getting bothered), but even if every one of that 51% was really never, that still means that half of women poster presenters had a bad experience. And that’s unacceptable. And reading the replies to that poll is not fun. ...

This month’s link round-up begins with a big tutorial on making posters by Desi Quintans, “ How I make conference posters .” Excerpt: About my design ethos I think that visual design is just as important as content. I believe that by adapting lessons from other fields of publishing, we can design posters that are unconventional and surprising, and yet attractive to look at and informative to read. The alternative is to be cursed with posters that all look the same . This lengthy piece covers some material that’s familiar to regular readers, but provides it in a convenient one-stop shop. It’s this month’s “must read!” ••••• Nichloas Rowe has authored Academic & Scientific Poster Presentation: A Modern Comprehensive Guide for Springer. I may have a longer review later, but wanted to bring this to people’s attention now. ••••• Earyn McGee also has a thread on Twitter that describes her lessons as an early poster presenter, presenting at the SACNAS 2017 conference. Hat tip to Tob...

This month’s nominee for “Best poster ever” comes from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, and was created by Julian Resasco , with pictures by Andrew Bell : I got multiple people forwarding this to me, and saw many positive comments on Twitter, so this one is definitely a fan favourite. I am hoping Julian will submit this to the blog so we can talk about it in more detail later! Hat tip to Jacquelyn Gill , Michele Banks , and Megan Lynch . The ESA meeting also gave us a candidate for “best poster reuse”: Hat tip to Nathan Emery and the Ecological Society of America. Data is the Spotlight is a blog that does for figures what this one does for posters. Hat tip to Arjun Raj and Prachee Avasthi. Terry McGlynn makes an important point about conference scheduling , using the ESA meeting as an example : Many with “late-breaking” posters are stuck on Friday because they weren’t aware of the deadline, or didn’t have funding 6 months ago. Who is most likely to not get the heads...

Many conferences have some sort of awards for “Best student poster.” But John Vanek recently noted something I pointed out early on in this blog: the winners are often not very good looking posters. Pet peeve: when posters that are simply walls of text win best poster awards, despite all the advice that stresses not to do that. This is not surprising. I’ve judged many presentations, and there is always some sort of scoring sheet to guide the judges. Those scoring schemes always weight the content of the presentation (whether poster or talk) more heavily than the visual excellence of the presentation. Hey, conference organizers: be like the Oscars. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognize that there are many components to making movies. These all deserve to be recognized. So they have the main Oscars, and a separate ceremony for scientific and technical awards. If you are going to judge poster presentations, make two awards. Give one award purely for the scientific co...

Here’s the level of “attention to detail” that anyone who designs should aspire to: This makeover from Rian Hughes is shown here . His website is well worth checking out. Hat tip to John Wick. Titles matter. This article analyzes what titles of scientific articles get social media buzz . Funny titles don’t help. But making positive, definite statements about the results does. These data support the Columbo principle for writing titles: Show the murder. Make the audience wonder, “How can you prove it?” instead of “Whodunnit?” Hat tip to Neuroskeptic . If you are conference organizer, one of your main goals should be encouraging interaction with students and more senior people. Andrew Thaler reports on a solution pioneered by the International Marine Conservation Congress : Giving the only drink tickets to the students to hand out during poster presentations is a brilliant move. One of my bugbears is how often people use idiosyncratic abbreviations and acronyms. I’ll let you have DNA,...

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...