Insights on Poster Preparation Practices in Life Sciences

Posters are intended to spark scientific dialogue and omnipresent at biological conferences. Guides and how-to articles help life scientists in preparing informative visualizations in poster format. However, those posters shown at conferences are at present often overloaded with data and text and are poorly designed, which in sum hinder, rather than spark communication. Here, we surveyed life scientists themselves to understand why posters are such a struggle and to shed light on poster preparation from their subjective perspectives. We find that biologist spend on average two entire days preparing one poster, with half of the time devoted to visual design aspects. Most respond that they receive no design or software training and also receive little to no feedback when preparing their visualizations. In conclusion, our data suggests that some training, beyond providing literature, of life scientists in visualization principles and tools would likely improve conference poster quality. In addition, this would also improve other common visuals such as figures and slides, and thus overall benefit the science communication of researchers.