PRESENTATION GUIDELINES
On Communicating Your Research
Scientists share their ideas and results of experimental or theoretical work with their colleagues and the general public in the form of poster presentations and talks at conferences, and in the form of detailed scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Each year millions of papers are published and that means that it is hard to get noticed. How do scientists increase the exposure of their ideas and research results? The answer relies on skillful and professional presentation. Presenting a poster in a conference is a great starting point to your scientific career.
Writing Your Title
There are several elements in the scientific work that can be used to attract attention. First, the title should clearly reflect the essence of the work without being too technical or verbose. "Making of a Living Organism in the Lab" is attractive but it would have been too broad (and too bold) while Chemical Synthesis of 1080 Base-pair Oligonucleotides Encoding for Mycoplasma mycoides Followed by a Step-wise Homologous Recombination inSaccharomyces cerevisiae, and Transplantation of the Resulting Semi-synthetic Genome into a RecipientMycoplasma capricolum Cell." would have been considered too technical. Notice that it is customary to capitalize all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives with the exception of Latin names of scientific species.
Writing Your Abstract
If your title catches the attention of your potential reader, he or she will take a look at your abstract next in order to decide if your work merits further attention. Your abstract is a brief highly readable summary of your scholarly work and novel contributions that will be outlined in your poster, talk, or research paper. Keep in mind that your abstract will be viewed by a broad audience and will be often publicly available for a long time. It might be evaluated by specialists in the field who are interested in your specific contribution, it will be read by your colleagues to see what you have been up to, it may be checked out by your future employer to assess your willingness to work hard, or it may be scanned by some funding agency official to judge if you and your mentor spent the grant money appropriately. This means that your abstract should be scientifically rigorous, but also readable by people who are not specialists in your narrow research field.
What Belongs and Does Not Belong in Your Abstract
There are no hard, general rules in writing an abstract. However, a good abstract usually states the problem that you are trying to solve and outlines the guiding hypothesis that you will be following. In a sentence or two, it describes what methodology and techniques were used to tackle the problem. The bulk of the abstract would describe the novel findings from your work, and discuss the implication of these findings. If you can make a firm conclusion about the system you were studying based on your results, you can finish your abstract with such a conclusion. If your work did not allow to make firm conclusions but uncovered new questions, suggested new experiments, or raised new hypotheses, it is appropriate to mention these near the end.
Notice that the abstract in natural sciences is not a place to provide an extensive literature review about your object of study, nor it is a place to compare, contrast, and critique ideas of other researchers. People are not looking to abstracts to find excuses on why your experiments failed, or learn that the rigorous data analysis was beyond the intellectual capabilities of the authors. While you know well that the research you report on could have been done better, do not dwell in the abstract on the shortcomings of your work. A discussion section in the paper is an appropriate place to suggest further experiments and improvements.
Graphical abstract is a common practice in many journals and conference proceeding booklets. The old adage “A picture is worth 1000 words” is true. You can deliver concise information in eye-catching manner. It is extra work but think for a minute: Would you rather read a paragraph or look at a picture? Graphical abstract should be accurate and clear. See more about designing figures below.
Example Abstract
Below is an example abstract that was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Society, 2015, 137 (4), pp 1476–1484)
As you can see, the authors tell us in the first sentence what is the paper about and what their findings. Then they proceed to describe the methodology and techniques that were used or developed. They reveal the conclusions from each experiment and conclude with a border impact of the results.
It is useful to read several abstracts before embarking on writing your own.
Figures
Designing effective figure is requires many revisions. In fact, some scientists start a publication by designing figures. You can get excellent tips from this published paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201102518/epdf
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