Equity, Inclusion, Innovation, and Impact Student Research at Clermont

Good research posters address the following points:

• The scientific problem or research question;
• The significance of the problem or why a person should care;
• How the experiment or study addresses the problem;
• What experiments or studies were actually performed;
• The results of the experiment or study;
• Analysis of the results and/or the conclusion.

You may also want to include any caveats or reservations about the results and future prospects for the research.

Your poster should have a mix of words/pictures/graphs/charts/etc. Text should be brief and concise without long sections. Break your text up using headings and bullet points. All graphics and images should be relevant to the research topic. Graphs and charts should be easy to read.

Before you consider the formatting and construction issues associated with an academic poster, it is important to hone your content in Word, Google Docs, or another familiar word processing format. Composing your poster as a poster will take longer -- so commit your words to the page in a more familiar format first.

When composing poster content, keep the following sections of information in mind, as they'll be clearly separated on the poster as first-level headings.  Check with your professor about their expectations about these major headings, too:

• Title, Author(s), Affiliation(s)
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Conclusion
• References

Poster Specifications:

Use a standard tri-fold display board. Measurements should be 36" x 48" open and 36" x 24" closed.

PowerPoint is the easiest way to create a UC-branded poster with minimal formatting work.  You can use PowerPoint on a PC or a Mac, but switching between those two versions midway can result in the loss of some formatting fidelity.

• Begin by choosing a UC-branded PowerPoint template (scroll to bottom for PowerPoint template).
• Change the slide size to 56 inches (width) by 44.8 inches (height).  When you print your poster, export/save as PDF and this will be the paper size.  Traditional PowerPoint slide size defaults are 13 x 7.5 inches (widescreen) or 10 x 7.5 inches (standard). It is important to do this immediately, before adding any content.
• Save your work in safe place that allows collaboration and back-up.