How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Organization
How to prepare a poster
Conference communications

The organization of a poster normally should follow the IMRAD format (introduction, methods, results, and discussion). There is very little text in a well-designed poster; most of the space is used for illustrations. In general, a poster should contain no more than 500 to 1,000 words (approximately the number of words in two to four double-spaced pages of manuscript or in two to four typical article abstracts). If a poster is in landscape format, with the width exceeding the height, placing the content in three to five vertical columns generally works well. For posters in portrait format, using two or three columns is usually the best choice. Unless the conference organizers require an abstract on your poster, do not include one; the poster as a whole is not much more extensive than an abstract, so an abstract tends to be redundant and waste valuable space. Where feasible, use bulleted or numbered lists rather than paragraphs. If paragraphs are used, keep them short for readability.

The introduction should present the problem succinctly; the poster will fail unless it has a clear statement of purpose at the beginning. The methods section will be very brief; sometimes a sentence or two will suffice to describe the type of approach used. The results section, which is often the shortest part of a written paper, is usually the major part of a well-designed poster. Most of the available space should be used to illustrate the results. The discussion should be brief. Some of the best posters do not even use the heading “Discussion”; instead, the heading “Conclusions” appears over the far-right panel, with the individual conclusions perhaps being in the form of numbered or bulleted short sentences. Literature citations should be kept to a minimum.