Conference posters could garner a wider audience, thanks to a new online platform

From ScienceMag:

In 1969, the Federation of European Biochemical Societies held what may have been the first poster session at a scientific conference. With only about 15 posters, it would have been a far cry from the massive displays at most conferences today.

Some conference attendees value the in-person engagement opportunities that poster sessions can offer, including networking, helping early-career researchers become comfortable presenting their results, and real-time brainstorming and troubleshooting with others. But many bemoan the difficulty of navigating a vast hall of dense, often poorly designed displays to find the needle-in-a-haystack results that may be relevant or interesting to a particular researcher.

A new project called Posters.science is proposing that online perusal could help raise the visibility and utility of the lowly poster—and be accessible to any researcher, even those who couldn’t attend a conference. “I cannot be at all conferences, but if afterwards I can search them easily for topics I’m interested in, that could be pretty cool,” says Bhavesh Patel, a research data management specialist at the nonprofit California Medical Innovations Institute (CalMI2), which developed the platform.

The website, which debuted in June, provides a centralized index of more than 30,000 posters across multiple disciplines, tagged with information about the conference when available. That initial batch was largely drawn from existing repositories; researchers can also upload their own posters. Patel and his colleagues at CalMI2 say they hope Posters.science will surface posters that could help scientists accelerate discovery by refining their hypotheses, enriching literature searches, and finding prospective collaborators.

Efforts like this are important because most posters are effectively invisible, according to a preprint study posted on the arXiv server last month by Patel and colleagues. Of the estimated millions of posters presented annually, the research team found no more than 150,000 posters in 68 online repositories; an undetermined number included only a title and abstract. The team estimates only 42% of the posters had been assigned a digital object identifier, a standardized code that makes them easier to find online and cite. And most were not easily searchable by, for instance, the name and date of the conference. (Some conferences archive posters on their own websites only for those who paid to attend the meeting.)

Posters.science may be helpful, says Iva Cheung of Simon Fraser University. But it alone will not resolve the problems of the traditional poster format, which she says needs to evolve. “I just don’t think that it’s an effective way of sharing research information or developing [professional] networks,” says Cheung, who teaches research literacy and once wrote a blog post titled “Why academic conference posters suck.”

She notes that a 3-by-4-foot poster is often too crammed with text to be easily digested by viewers—and even then, it often leaves out many details of a study. A recent trend in poster design encourages streamlining the information and providing links to supplementary online information. But then “you’re basically putting up this big sheet of paper that says ‘Look somewhere else,’” Cheung says. She would like to see an expansion of alternative formats some conferences have begun to offer for briefly presenting work, including live “lightning” talks, printed handouts, and digital posters containing video, audio, and slide shows that are displayed on large screens.

Patel welcomes such experimentation and also celebrates variety in traditional poster design. “I like the creative freedom people have to shape posters—it’s a way for us as researchers to express ourselves,” he says.

His study found that making posters available online may draw some readership. According to the team’s analysis of a subset of 38,000 posters for which page view data were readily available, on average each had attracted 247 views; about 90% received at least one.

To make posters more useful, Patel’s team converts the text of all PDFs indexed in Posters.science into a format that can be readily read and analyzed by artificial intelligence. They are seeking to expand the platform’s functionality to extract and convert information from tables and images as well—a technically challenging task because poster design and formatting are so variable.

A centralized online platform to access posters has long been needed, says Nicholas Rowe, an independent researcher in Finland who has studied the role of posters in scientific communication. Otherwise, there may be no other way to see their results: His 2019 dissertation reports that as few as 1% of conference posters are eventually published in peer-reviewed journals.

But he agrees with Cheung that posters also need an overhaul made possible by modern digital tools. “I’d like to see us as a scientific community stand up and say we’re not doing this as well as we could be. Let’s have proper discussions about how we can make this better.”

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