Practices of Poster Preparation in Biological Sciences - Datasets

Poster sessions are important for the scientific dialogue at conferences and widely used in biology. Preparing a concise and legible poster is however challenging and posters currently are often overloaded with data, text, have inconsistent colour schemes or unintuitive layouts, all of which hinder communication. We performed a qualitative survey and interviews to understand how currently biologist prepare their conference posters. This revealed that biologist spend on average two days preparation a single poster, with half of the time devoted to design aspects. The majority of interviewees state that they received no training for poster design or with professional software tools. Additionally, most participants stated that they had little or no feedback from co-authors and colleagues. Manuscript: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.08.331413v