At some time or other, you may find yourself having to prepare a poster presentation. Posters are an excellent way of conveying a lot of information in a concise, efficient, and compelling form. They are especially useful for early-career scientists – including psychological scientists – to learn how to communicate effectively and also to meet colleagues from other institutions.

A poster generally should include the following elements:

■ Title

You want a title to be descriptive of what you have done but also compelling. Which poster would you rather read: “Effects of Professors’ Level of Interestingness on Students’ Attention During Class” or “Boring Professors Really Do Put Students to Sleep”? Try to formulate a title that conveys your main message and at the same time will capture people's attention.

■ Authors and institutional affiliations

List all authors and their institutional affiliations. Make sure not to omit anyone who has done substantial scientific work on the project that gave rise to the poster.

■ Abstract

In the abstract, you should state the big question, how you addressed it, what you found, and what it means. Abstracts, especially in posters, need to be concise and to the point.

■ Background/literature review

In a poster, you do not have a lot of space for literature review. Therefore limit the review to previous research directly relevant to your own research. Make sure you do not omit any citations that are crucial to the theory and/or hypotheses underlying your research.

■ Research question(s)

State directly the question (or questions) you are asking in your research. Beyond that, say something about why the research question is important both to science and to the person reading your poster. Why should the person attending a poster presentation read your poster when there are so many other posters to read?

■ Methods

Specify who your subjects were, what materials you used, what the design of your study was, and what your procedure was. It often helps to give an example of any materials that were central to your study.

■ Results

What were your main findings? Give the statistics on which the findings are based, either as numbers or, better, in a figure. You cannot, in a poster, give lots of results, so limit your presentation to the most important ones.