Maximising the impact of your scientific poster
A scientific poster is more than just a summary of your research, it’s an opportunity to start conversations. In this recap of ELRIG’s latest webinar, our expert panel shares practical advice on designing, presenting and extending the reach of your next scientific poster, plus answers to the audience’s top questions.
Whether you’re presenting your first poster or your fiftieth, creating a clear, engaging poster and making the most of your poster session are skills that can significantly increase the impact of your research. As part of ELRIG’s webinar series, we brought together experts from across the scientific community to share practical guidance on preparing, presenting and promoting scientific posters. The full recording is now available to watch on demand.
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Meet the panelists
Chaired by ELRIG Early Career Professionals (ECP) Work Group member Jasmine Trigg, a senior scientist at Sartorius, the session offered best practice and practical advice for researchers at every career stage. The panel included:
- Brian Hudson, senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, working in molecular pharmacology and drug discovery in an academic setting, who has supervised many students and helped them make lots of posters presented at various scientific meetings. He is also a member of the British Pharmacological Society’s meetings committee, where he has a significant role reviewing and assessing abstracts and posters for meetings.
- Frank Barker, head of marketing at AZoNetwork, a leading online publisher for science, engineering and healthcare, whose mission is sharing science stories with people who make a difference. AZoNetwork reaches over 50 million visits across News-Medical and AZoLifeSciences, as well as over one million subscribers across 100 different strategic verticals — from drug discovery and pharmaceutical manufacturing to antibodies and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.
Does AZoNetwork turn a paper poster into an e-poster?
Yes. When you sign up to AZo Network’s poster e-book, your poster is taken from PDF and put into HTML format. The figures, the tables and the images are labelled so they’re searchable online, then published on News-Medical or AZoLifeSciences.com
Could publishing a poster like this become problematic when wanting to publish the work as a scientific paper at a later point?
Generally, no. As is very common now in biomedical sciences, people publish preprints before a paper is published in a journal, publishing a poster online is much the same. Most journals don’t have a problem with it as long as you retain the rights to it.
If you have join AZo’s poster e-book and want it removed later, AZoNetwork will honour that request.
How many presenters with posters will there roughly be at Drug Discovery?
We estimate there will be 400 posters, with a mixture early, mid and late career presenters
What are common mistakes to avoid on a poster?
The single biggest one is too much text. Large blocks of text are off-putting. After that, it’s the little things: making sure graphs are all the same size, and things are aligned and equally spaced.
What's the panel's opinion on self-advertisement on a poster?
QR codes linking to social media, LinkedIn or similar are generally seen as a good idea. It’s very useful if someone visits your poster when you’re not there and wants to find you later at the meeting.
Can data be added as a QR code?
This is very much a project-specific decision. If you have a data set you want to make available, that’s a very good thing to do, depending on whether sharing data in that format is appropriate for your particular project.
