What to Include
The following are suggestions to help craft your poster. Ultimately, your research project’s design should guide the content and layout of your poster. Depending on your project, the titles and lengths of these sections may vary.
- Title: short and descriptive with strong active verb i.e. Substance x induces y cells, not Effect of x on y cells
- Name and Affiliation: your name, your faculty sponsor’s name, name(s) of any co-investigator(s), and your university’s name and department
- Introduction: present the question being explored by your research, place it in the context of current knowledge about the topic, and convince the reader of the significance of your study
- Methods: describe your methods in sufficient detail to allow a reader who works in your field to understand how you collected your data. Illustrations are appropriate for complex experimental design, etc.
- Results: summarize the results of your research, whether positive or negative; use key results to confirm your message; graphs, charts, and figures can help visually articulate these results
- Discussion: interpret the meaning of your results with respect to the original questions, including your conclusions about the answers to the questions that motivated your research that you described in the introduction. If appropriate, mention any alternative explanation for your results and mention possible explanations for unexpected results.
- Literature Cited: cite all of your references in text and list them in the Literature Cited section, using a format from a major journal within your discipline.
- Graphics, Tables, Photos, and Other: graphic elements can help make your poster visually interesting and present key data in an easy to comprehend way; graphics should make sense in the context of your research – only include visual elements that support your primary message