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Record your presentation and listen to yourself
I’ve been fortunate that in the last couple of years, I was invited to do some podcasts. I listened back to each of them afterwards.Yup, it was not fun. I became more aware of some of my speech...
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Cell Bio 2023
How it started:How it’s going:Second photo from https://x.com/lenakumba/status/1731423282228867322
View ArticleA great conference poster is worth $1,000
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...
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AI-generated rat image shows that scientific graphics are undervalued
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...
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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...
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