Creating Research Posters: Getting Started

Before you begin building your poster, ask yourself: What is the central message I'm hoping to convey with this poster? This could be why the research that you did was important, a particularly surprising or interesting result, or how you plan to expand on the research in the future. As you begin to design your poster, keep that message in mind; the choices you make about the poster's content and, to a lesser extent, design should be made to support that central message.

Research posters, by and large, follow a general set of guidelines without all being the same, much in the same way that research papers often follow a familiar structure:

1. The poster's title (centered at the top) followed the names of the authors; each author is usually listed with their associated department or academic institution, along with perhaps an email address
2. The poster's content, broken up into 3 or 4 columns or equal (or nearly-equal) width
3. The content of the poster is broken up into different sections, each with an accompanying heading, just like a research paper

It's a good idea to outline the key points you'll need to include while making a rough sketch of the poster.

Image from Indiana University's IT Training Tips blog

This will help you figure out how much information you'll be able to include, what kind of graphs or charts you may need to make, and how the content will look one the poster when finished. No need to get fancy, this is just a visual outline to get you thinking about the process.

It's not always easy to find examples of research posters, especially in a specific subject area. Here are some general examples of how a research poster can be set up:

1. Poster Example #1
2. Poster Example #2
3. Poster Example #3
4. Poster Example #4

Another place to look for samples could be to check repositories such as DigitalCommons, which is primarily used for articles but does also contains some research posters: