Poster Peer Review: What Makes an Effective Scientific Poster?

The publication and presentation of research findings are key skills in the modern scientific community, but many graduate students and rising young scientists often lack the skills to effectively convey their research findings to a larger audience. Throughout graduate school and during the peer review process for manuscript publication, many scientists are given insightful and critical feedback to improve their skills in long-form academic writing. More often neglected, however, is the improvement of skills necessary to concisely and visually present complex results and conclusions in the form of scientific posters. Such poster sessions are common events at scientific conferences and symposia. These poster sessions and the accompanying short presentations by their authors allow young scientists to very effectively engage with their audience and deliver the results and conclusions from research projects. In the absence of a formal review process or information on proper design, many posters are inaccessible or ineffective, and are unfortunately overlooked despite containing compelling results. In this workshop session, we open several example scientific posters to audience critique and then deconstruct them to show what attributes make some posters engaging and appealing, while other posters remain tedious and ineffective. We will also work collaboratively to design a poster from a hypothetical research project in order to apply the results of our discussion.