Biological Sciences: 03-346: Experimental Neuroscience: Content

Posters have the same basic components as a manuscript (i.e. introduction, methods, results, conclusions, references, acknowledgements). They don't need to have an abstract because the whole poster can be though of as a visual abstract.  It's a summary of your project that uses a combination of text and graphics. Not including an abstract will free up space that can be used for other content.  

There is not one correct way to organize a poster but typically the sections are chunked and the poster is organized in columns. Below is a common format. The results will be the major component and there are typically 1 to 5 results sections depending on the project.

The benefit of this format is that it has logical flow. Posters are often read in the following direction.

• 1-2 lines that describes the problem being studied
• Mention the organism/model system being studied in the title
• Mention the technique if its important to the study
• Commonly only first word is capitalized

• One or two short paragraphs or bulleted points
• States the research question and why it is important
• The objectives of your research or the hypotheses being tested
• Mentions model system being used
• Cites related studies (2-3 references that would be listed in the References section)

• Briefly describe the experimental methods and materials used
• Only write about methods that were used to get the results
• Use schematics when possible to go along with brief amounts of text

• This is the heart of the poster and usually gets the most space
• Choose your key results and organize each as a separate box or piece of paper
• Give each box a descriptive title of the main finding, not just “Results”, so that the reader is immediately primed for the information you are trying to convey
• Make sure all graphs, tables, charts etc. are well-labeled
• Use graphics as much as possible with just enough text that a person can understand it – make every word count!

• Just a few bullet points describing major conclusions and future directions
• If the conclusions can be well represented by a schematic, you can include one along with your bullet points