Abstract:

Research posters have become a popular medium for presenting the results of projects to participants at academic conferences. Unfortunately, however, researchers often regard posters as poor cousins to oral presentations or published papers and fail to recognize the full potential of the poster as a medium for communication about research. This paper reports on a collaborative project involving language and design experts that aimed to produce training workshops for doctoral students of science and engineering to enable them to create effective research posters in English. The workshops were developed at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology by colleagues from the Center for Language Education (CLE) and the Publishing Technology Center (PTC). One of the aims of the collaboration was to identify language and design features that characterize research posters and distinguish them from more familiar academic genres, such as journal articles, theses, research reports and abstracts.

The paper focuses on the following aspects of research posters:
(a) the formulation and graphic representation of headings (including the preference for results-oriented headings in posters);
(b) the use of figures to represent theory and processes;
(c) effective navigation principles and techniques.

Research posters produced by graduate students during the workshops will serve as illustrations of the opportunities and challenges presented by the research poster as an academic text.

Keywords:

Research poster, data display, collaboration.