Presentations in Medicine & Science: Overview

Poster Presentations

Posters are a legitimate and popular presentation format for research and clinical vignettes. They efficiently communicate concepts and data to an audience using a combination of visuals and text. Most scientific meeting planners take advantage of the popularity and communication efficiency of poster presentations by scheduling more posters than oral presentations. Poster presentations allow the author to meet and speak informally with interested viewers, facilitating a greater exchange of ideas and networking opportunities than with oral presentations. Poster presentations often are the first opportunities for young investigators to present their work at important scientific meetings and preparatory for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

In order to be successful, certain prerequisites must be met:

• You must have a desire to be scholastically effective and be willing to put the time into the design and production of the poster.
• You need organizational skills. Like any other endeavor associated with deadlines, you must be able to deliver the product on time. Posters are associated with more deadlines than oral presentations, due to the necessary interaction with graphic artists, graphic production, and the needs of the meeting itself. Organizational skills are also needed to create a concise and logically structured graphic and text presentation of the research or vignette. In order to help you achieve these goals, this article addresses poster planning, production, and presentation.

Effective poster presentations:

• are organized
• are visually appealing
• are succinct
• presented clearly and with enthusiasm
• tell a story

The most important rules:

• Have your poster fit in the space provided
• Make your poster readable from 4 ft away
• Don’t try to put everything about your project on your poster. It will be less cluttered and will encourage viewers to ask questions
• Limit the text