👓 To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over | NPR

Read To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over by Nell Greenfieldboyce (NPR)

Mike Morrison hardly looks like a revolutionary. He's wearing a dark suit and has short hair. But we're about to enter a world of conformity that hasn't changed in decades — maybe even a century. And in there, his vision seems radical. "We are about to walk into a room full of 100 scientific posters, where researchers are trying to display their findings on a big poster board," says Morrison, a doctoral student in psychology at Michigan State University. The idea of a science poster is simple. Get some poster-making materials and then slap on a title, the experimental methods and the results. Almost everyone has created a poster like this at some point — often in childhood, for a school assignment or a science fair.

I like the idea of this, but most conferences worth their salt also publish short abstracts of most poster presentations which have roughly this type of short overview of poster presentations. Prepared researchers will have scanned through them all and highlighted a dozen or so they want to stop by to see more about or meet the researchers.

Of course, all this to say that this method isn’t a potential improvement for the lazy drive-by poster visitor.