How to prepare your Poster for a Scientific Conference

Presenting a poster in a scientific conference — a small step of a grad student for introducing his/her research work to the scientific community. It is an usual practice in academia for the new student researchers who gain their first experience of presenting their work at a conference in the form of a poster.

A poster is a synopsis of your research work in a visually engaging way. It is not a bottomless pit where you dump all of your findings in the form of data, table or images. You have dozens of plots and couple of images, and you are super-excited to share them with the world — Just hold on over there for a minute. Think and ask yourself — are the really necessary? And the answer that will pop up in your mind should be No.

In a conference, a poster should be your networking tool — it should be able to attract people’s attention from a distance and serves as a conversation starter. People usually spend 3–5 minutes on a poster, and if they are interested then they might want to know all the details of your research. You can deliver the background information so that they can put your work into context, understand what you have done and why you have done, and also it’s broader impact. In short, it is a graphical abstract of your research whose sole purpose is to dive the attention of the crowd to your research.

Before you rush to open your power point or any other design software, ask yourself the following questions: who is my ideal audience for this poster? Should i design for the experts in my own field, or perhaps for the broader audience? This is a key point because if you put your effort into making your poster understandable to the broader audience, you will automatically increase your potential and impact. As an academic, we often have the tendency of writing using scientific jargon, passive tenses and tangled sentences to portray ourselves most erudite person. Don’t do that. Use plain English words — it will serve both experts and non-experts.

You want to captivate your audience, create a story. Like all great stories your research needs a beginning, a middle and an end. As a story teller, your responsibility is to make the content both engaging and exciting.

The introduction should set the scene and introduce the main characters [1]:

The middle section is the adventure, it answers:

The final section is the conclusion to the story:

Once you have sorted out above those, now you are ready to design your poster. Your poster may include many of the following sections

Make the flow of a poster simple, intuitive, and easy to follow. Make sure that you have sufficient white space around text and sections to ensure a clear layout and flow.

Before your poster session starts make sure that you completely understand all the figures that you put on. You should be able to explain them fully and know their full implications. You should be able to tell all the key-points of your research story without referring to the printed texts. Always be prepared to answer likely questions with confidence, and know how to deal with difficult questions that you might not be able to answer fully.

Finally, you will obviously get feedback — I remember in one my poster session a Japanese professor advised me to modify the title of my poster, people from your field may have some valuable comments for your figures. Take those seriously and improvise your work accordingly for your next presentation.

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