35 Complete poster
Characteristics
- The poster itself should be written so that an audience can understand every part of the poster without needing the author to explain it.
- Simple and clean design, organised, easy to read for a person standing 1 metre (3 feet) away from the poster.
- Contains Title, Author Names and Contact Information, Abstract, Introduction, Materials & Methods, Results, Discussion, Figures, Tables, References and Acknowledgements.
A complete poster should contain all the necessary parts. The title, authors and abstract appear first, followed by the introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, conclusion, references and acknowledgements.
A poster should also contain 4-10 figures (e.g. graph, histogram, chart, image, color-coded map) and/or tables. When printed on paper, a poster should be 91cm (36 inches) high and 122cm (48 inches) wide. Most scientific conferences require posters match these dimensions.
Posters of this size must be printed on paper using large format poster printers. Printing cost depends on a number of things (e.g. type of paper, type of ink, turnaround time). Because of the high cost associated with printing a poster on paper, extra time should be spent checking over every detail of a poster before the author decides to send it for printing.
This chapter is adapted from “Complete Poster” in Scientific Posters: A Learner’s Guide by Ella Weaver, Kylienne A. Shaul, Henry Griffy and Brian H. Lower, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
