Creating an academic poster
Academic posters
What should I include?
- Message
After you have a general idea of what your poster is going to look like, think about the message you are trying to convey. It’s worth spending the time to distill your research and findings into a key message and focus your poster on communicating that. Just like a peer-reviewed article or conference presentation, it’s impossible to include all aspects of your project in a poster. Choose carefully what it is you want your colleagues to know.
http://guides.nyu.edu/posters suggests you answer these three questions before getting started
- What is the most important/interesting/astounding finding from my research project?
- How can I visually share my research with conference attendees? Should I use charts, graphs, photos, images?
- What kind of information can I convey during my talk that will complement my poster?
- Audience
It’s also important to think about the audience. Determine if your poster will be used at multiple events or at one. For each event, think about who will be seeing your poster. This will help you determine how much background and specialist information to include.
- Categories of information to include
The usual categories of information are usually:
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- title (be sure it isn’t too long)
- introduction or context (but no abstract – the poster is in itself an abstract of your research)
- materials/methods/theory
- results
- conclusions
- citations
- acknowledgments, including of awards and funding received for this project, disclosures of conflict of interest, etc.
- institutional affiliation and contact information
For posters that are communicating research that is Arts-focused, play with these elements to see what works best for you. There is no set poster script for these kinds of posters, which means you can use your creativity to convey your message.
Try to balance, or at least supplement, text with graphs, charts, images, etc.