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Belated fifteenth blogiversary
That’s right, I totally forgot to mention that this project clocked 15 years last month!While posting has slowed due to my new job, I have no plans to discontinue this project. There is still so much...
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Your conference poster should have less than one thousand words
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...
View ArticleA simple way to assess conference posters shows you can do better than the...
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...
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Link roundup for August 2024
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...
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Poster sessions may reflect scientific progress more accurately than the...
I was listening to a podcast recently, and heard this:In an analysis of more than 300,000 scientific conference presentations, informal posters or talks that scientists often endeavour to turn into...
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Spin me right round like a record
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...
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Palm-sized poster
Handouts of posters at conferences are not new. But handouts that are hand-sized, well... I haven’t seen that before.Jake Wintermute shared this image, and wrote:(T)his image makes me want to go to a...
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Presenting to a pigeon
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 #sfn2024Little did he know....
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The delight is in the details
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....
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Identifying conferences with ConfIDent, a persitent identifier for academic...
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....
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Critique and makeover: Heart emergencies
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...
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Incoming: Conference accessibility panels at ISMPP 2025
Are you going to be in London this coming January? Then you may be interested in the 2025 European conference of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals.I bring this up here...
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Critique and makeover: Species richness
Disclaimer: This blog post does not show a conference poster. I hope the lessons are still useful.This is Figure 7 in a recently published journal article (Wiens 2024; open access, free to read). Click...
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Waffle charts are an underused alternative to pie charts
I was looking at a poster with a pie chart recently. Like this:There are a lot of criticisms of pie charts, but this was not a terrible example. But I was struck by how awkward that circle looked in a...
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How PowerPoint sabotages your poster (and how to fix it)
PowerPoint is the software most commonly used to make conference posters, by a long way. Here’s a few ways that PowerPoint works against you when you are creating a conference poster.Size limits...
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In search of an online and hybrid poster session that works
Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of discussions about conference accessibility and online conferences. The advantages of online conferences became almost immediately apparent in 2020, when the...
View ArticleChange your poster title when publishing the paper
A recent paper by Prasad and colleagues (2025) provided some advice on how to turn a conference poster or presentation into a publication. For the most part, these are common sense if you understand...
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Old school numbers have advantages
“Why aren’t there lowercase numbers?”Well, there are. I’ve mentioned the excellent MyFont manuals about typography before. Their latest is about the different ways that numbers are shown in type.Early...
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Lessons from political parties: More points means less clarity
One of the major American political parties shared this on their social media accounts this weekend.I saw this post not in its original form, but from critiques of it. And it deserves those...
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Reimaging posters on In Plain Cite podcast
Everyone has a podcast now. Even the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals . They just renamed their podcast to In Plain Cite, and their first real episode is about conference...
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Critique: No grave mistakes
This poster comes from Spencer Moore. Click to enlarge!I’m super pleased to have posters that are not from the traditional sciences. This one is off to a good start. This posters had a big advantage,...
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Sweet sixteen
Almost missed blogiversary month!It’s always a little crazy to think how this one project, started almost on a whim spinning off from my general academic blog, has managed to keep going.I thank you for...
View ArticleYou can’t have a great poster session in a bad conference
Many academics are aware of predatory or low-quality journals, but I get the impression that many are not as aware of predatory or low-quality conferences.Christine Ro has just released an article in...
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Politics hits poster sessions
Alexandra Witze reports:Here at the ASSW (Arctic Science Summit Week - ZF) Arctic science conference in Boulder, a poster describing research done with US federal funds has words including “ethical”...
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Water Whys presentation, 28 March 2025: Poster pitfalls and power-ups!
I’ll be giving an online presentation tomorrow, March 28 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time or 11:00 a.m. Arizona time.There is still time to register! Visit https://waterwhys.org/seminar/spring-2025/...
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