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Poster power


Michael Oberdorfer

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  • 2 weeks later...
Amanda Labuza

This is an interesting idea. Mike Morrison very accurately described the problem with poster sessions. But it seems the main takeaway is to make the title shorter, and “punchier”. The title just needs to be your conclusion in simple terms. How does this translate to the issue that we are writing our titles 6 months before we have finished and have conclusions? Do we really need to reformat everything or just the way we approach titles?

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David Reiner

I think the major flaw in the new poster design is lack of figures that would stimulate discussion. I think if figures would instead viewed on mobile devices, this might end up decreasing the scientific discussion and limiting the exchange of ideas and networking. On the other hand, this conversation has made more cognizant of the amount of text I include on my poster!

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Amanda Labuza

I agree that there is definitely a benefit to having the figures on the poster itself. Also, if I could just look up the figures part of me would definitely want to just scan and look at it later and miss the discussion part that actually has value.

I would also be worried about people being more hesitant to include unpublished data if you know people could have access it it mobile. While I know all scientists are perfectly ethical, it would be a concern at smaller conferences with labs I am competing against to give them digital access to my figures rather than the control in a poster session where they can only take notes.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Gabriella Panuccio

I agree with all the above. The major improvement in this poster design is the bold title that stands out very clear and easy to read even from a big distance, which makes the poster more catchy. But on the other hand, I personally am not a fan of QR codes. I know I’m surely going to end up with a big backlog on posters to go through. Because during big conferences, like SfN, it is basically impossible to see and discuss each and every poster you might be interested in, the QR code might seem as a helpful thing to put some topics aside for the moment in order to go back to them at a later time during the day. But the main positive thing of SfN and conferences in general, is the discussion and cross-fertilization and networking that derives from posters. A wall of word is well known to be an absolute no-go, but I believe that figures are fundamental to show. Few but highly informative and with a good color palette.

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Just came back from the 2019 neurotrauma conference in Pittsburgh, PA. They encouraged people to use this new poster format. And I gotta tell you guys, it’s not as cool as people think it is to see a 40 by 40 neuron right in the middle, and the title hovering above it. I went back and watched this mike morrison’s video introduction on youtube, and I don’t know. I feel like this design more for social science, or fields like epidemiology. For one, Mike said in the video that most posters are ‘a wall of words’, that’s not true for neuroscience at all. Most people has at least one or two color photos to show on their poster.

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Monica Lannom

This one is a no-brainer (sorry, couldn’t help myself). We will have 30,000+ people in Chicago in October. How about we give a survey and see how people respond to the new poster format for those that will be using it for the upcoming meeting. Who would like to tackle this because at this point having some hard data would be helpful especially if more conferences are encouraging participants to use the new poster format? I welcome your responses!

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Amanda Labuza

Thanks for the feedback from the recent conference. Did you feel like people were able to make more general titles or did it lose all meaning once you took out all the specific words, like which cell type and which protein, etc?

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