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Kamis, 07 April 2016

Latest modern science | The poster to publication puzzle (With stats and graphs and everything!) - Si Bejo Science

How many conference posters turn into published papers?

It�s not a trivial question. A huge amount of scientific information is presented at conferences. Scientific conferences should be the places to find the �coming thing.�

But in most research fields, the importance of conference presentations pale in significance to final papers, published in peer-reviewed journals. (My understanding is that conference proceedings take on more weight engineering and computing.)

How much material from conferences is lost is relevant to discussions about the speed and efficiency of scientific communication, replication crises, file drawer problems, p hacking, and the permanence of the scientific record. It raises issues of how much you can trust what you see at conferences, and how soon you might be able to cite work that you have seen at a conference.

There is an emerging literature on this. There are nine journal articles on the topic in the last two years alone.

Because this is the poster blog, I�m most interested in how many posters eventually turn into papers. So far, I�ve found eight papers that estimated how many posters and oral talks were eventually published. Because I�m a nerd scientist, I compared the probability that posters and papers will be published. I even did stats and graphs, damn it.

Posters have a significantly lower probability of being published than talks (t7 = -7.0, p = 0.00021). Posters have about a one in five chance of being published (21.2%), while talks have about a one in three chance of being published (34.4%).


Figure 1. Square = mean, horizontal line = median; box = 50% of data; whiskers = minumum and maximum; dots = individual papers (Bakkum & Trachimowicz 2015; Daruwalla et al., 2015; Durinka et al. 2015; Janssen et al., in press; Kinsella et al. 2015; Richling et al. 2014; Singh et al. 2015; Walsh et al. 2013).

The graph doesn�t quite give a real sense of the strength of the difference between posters and talks. Every one of the eight studies found that oral presentations were more likely to be published than posters at the same meeting. Here�s one that might show that a bit better:


Figure 2. Each line represents a single paper (same papers as Figure 1).

There are several hypotheses for why this difference exists, and they are not mutually exclusive.

  • Posters may be more likely to be given by students, who might not stay in research careers. If they leave, nobody picks up writing up the project.
  • Posters are more likely to be given early in a project, which means they are more likely to �blow up on the launchpad� or never be completed. Daruwalla and colleagues (2015) found no difference in the publication delay of posters and talks, however, which speaks against this hypothesis.
  • The authors of the posters may self-select their work, presenting what they consider to be weaker or less interesting projects as posters and saving their �A game� for talks. Evidence from Sawatsky and colleagues (2015) supports this: they found that posters had a lower average rating of scientific quality than talks. (This might also explain why most people prefer talks over posters: experience has shown them talks are better.)

Another five papers calculated how likely an abstract was to become a publication, but did not separate posters and oral presentations. The average there was about the same as calculated for talks (37.7%), with ranging anywhere from 18.8% to 73.5%. The latter, for a veterinary conference, is an outlier; no other conference cracked 50%.

A few papers calculated or presented data on the time between the conference presentation and the final appearance of the publication. The delay is usually around the two year mark.

This conference presentation conversion rate might be a measure that researchers can use to convince tenure and promotion committees that they are likely to be productive in the future. If more than a third of your posters have been turned into papers in a certain time frame, you are definitely ahead of the game.

There doesn�t seem to be any hints of a relationship between the field of research or the size of the conference in whether a presentation becomes a paper. That said, a couple of papers did use the opportunity to claim that higher conversion rates were indicative of the �high quality� of particular conferences (Durawalla et al. 2015; Kinsella et al. 2015).

Of course, once I had a benchmark, I had to know if I was beating it.

I opened my CV and counted 36 conference posters in my academic career (excluding local meetings on my own campus). So far, 32 of those have been turned into publications, a very satisfying 88% conversion rate.

But... this is a little misleading. Most of the studies had a time limit on getting those abstracts published. It was usually something like four or five years. If I knocked out papers that were five years or more between poster and publication (seven of them), my conversion rate drops to 69.4%. Which is... still not bad, actually. (But that one eight year delay between poster and paper... ugh.)

The ratio of posters to papers is nowhere near one to one, though. Sometimes projects made it onto multiple posters before being published as a single paper. One project got presented as a poster seven times before I was able to seal the deal and publish the project in a journal. My 32 poster presentations yielded 17 publications.

The reverse is true, too: there are some papers that I never presented at conferences, either as a talk or poster.

This topic seems to be an unexpectedly rich vein of meta-science. I would love to see an analysis from one of the mega-conferences, like the Neuroscience or American Geophysical Union meetings.

Extra special thanks!

This week�s post would have been impossible without the generosity of the awesome Biochem Belle! She first mentioned the poster to paper puzzle on Twitter. Then she saved me a bucket of work by creating a Google document with links to the papers below. Belle:


Additional, 9 April 2016: I ran a poll on Twitter asking people how many of their posters eventually turned into talks. I got 6o votes, which is not a bad sample size. Here are the results:


I am a little surprised by these results. These results are not exactly in line with the published results I summarize in the main part of the post. Maybe it reflects that scientists on Twitter are a more awesome subset of conference goers.

Update, 31 May 2016: I found a new paper which documents the lowest conversion from conference presentation to publication I have found yet. Disappointingly, it�s at a conference for medical publication professionals. Just 2.26% of posters turned into papers (3/133), and just 3.26% of talks became papers (1/31). Biochem Belle is also keeping track, and found another paper I missed. I have updated my box plot and t-test results accordingly:


Related posts

Variations on a theme: crayfish nociception

References

Bakkum BW, Trachimowicz R. 2015. Publication rates of abstracts presented at the 2006 meeting of the American Academy of Optometry. Optometry and Vision Science 92(11): 1069-1075. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/OPX.0000000000000712

Carey LC, Stretton S, Kenreigh CA, Wagner LT, Woolley KL. 2016. High nonpublication rate from publication professionals hinders evidence-based publication practices. PeerJ 4: e2011. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2011

Chand V, Rosenfeldt FL, Pepe S. 2008. The publication rate and impact of abstracts presented at the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (1999�2005). Heart, Lung and Circulation 17(5): 375-379. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hlc.2008.02.005

Daruwalla ZJ, Huq SS, Wong KL, Nee PY, Murphy DP. 2015. �Publish or perish��presentations at annual national orthopaedic meetings and their correlation with subsequent publication. Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research 10(1): 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13018-015-0203-y

Durinka JB, Chang P-N, Ortiz J. 2014. Fate of abstracts presented at the 2009 American Transplant Congress. Journal of Surgical Education 71(5): 674-679. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsurg.2014.02.002

Dyson DH, Sparling SC. 2016. Delay in final publication following abstract presentation: American College of Veterinary Anesthesiologists Annual Meeting. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education 43(1): in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jvme.33.1.145

Fosb�l EL, Fosb�l PL, Harrington RA, Eapen ZJ, Peterson ED. 2012. Conversion of cardiovascular conference abstracts to publications. Circulation 126(24): 2819-2825. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/126/24/2819.abstract

Janssen T, Bartels R, Lind B, Villas Tome C, Vleggeert-Lankamp CLA. Publication rate of paper and podium presentations from the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society Annual Meeting. European Spine Journal: in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00586-016-4404-9

Kalkan A, Kose O, Bilir O, Ersunan G, Ozel D, Guler F. 2015. Publication rate of abstracts presented at the emergency medicine congresses held by the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EUSEM) in 2011 and 2012. Emergency Medicine Journal 32: 728-732 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2014-204063

Kinsella SD, Menge TJ, Anderson AF, Spindler KP. 2015. Publication rates of podium versus poster presentations at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine Meetings: 2006-2010. The American Journal of Sports Medicine 43(5): 1255-1259. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0363546515573939

Richling SM, Rapp JT, Funk JA, D�Agostini J, Garrido N, Moreno V. 2014. Low publication rate of 2005 conference presentations: Implications for practitioners serving individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. Research in Developmental Disabilities 35(11): 2744-2750. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2014.07.023

Rosmarakis ES, Soteriades ES, Vergidis PI, Kasiakou SK, Falagas ME. 2005. From conference abstract to full paper: differences between data presented in conferences and journals. The FASEB Journal 19(7): 673-680. http://dx.doi.org/10.1096/fj.04-3140lfe

Sawatsky AP, Beckman TJ, Edakkanambeth Varayil J, Mandrekar JN, Reed DA, Wang AT. 2015. Association between study quality and publication rates of medical education abstracts presented at the Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meeting. Journal of General Internal Medicine 30(8): 1172-1177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11606-015-3269-7

Singh A, Solanki P, Mishra D. 2014. Publication rate of scientific papers presented at the XXVI Annual Convention of National Neonatology Forum (NEOCON 2006). The Indian Journal of Pediatrics 82(1): 25-28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12098-014-1475-7

Walsh CM, Fung M, Ginsburg S. 2013. Publication of results of abstracts presented at medical education conferences. JAMA 310(21): 2307-2309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.281671

Kamis, 05 November 2015

Latest modern science | Casing a poster - Si Bejo Science

I�m fascinated by the ways people recycle posters. Traditionally, posters are one-shot ephemera, which usually gotten reuse only by decorating department hallways. While fabric posters has some shortcomings for display compared to high quality paper posters, I have to admit: the reuse possibilities are much greater.

Christie Rowe has been steadily converting her posters into these awesome pencil cases! She shared this with me back in September:


And here�s some more finished ones.


The earth tones come naturally for Christie, who is in an Earth & Planetary Sciences department.


Data flash!





Kamis, 27 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | Link roundup for August 2015 - Si Bejo Science

And this month�s winner for best repurposing of a conference poster goes to Will Mandy:


BioMed Central is starting a series on scientific illustrations called, What�s Wrong With This Picture?


The collection has three articles so far, each of which examines a different specific graph and how it could be improved. The one above takes on bar charts versus box plots and rescaling the Y axis.

This title for the upcoming Society for Neuroscience meeting is sure to ignite debate about whether posters should have funny titles:

12 things you didn�t know about high responder/low responder rats, stress coping, and the dorsal raphe. Number 5 will blow your mind!

Hat tip to My Cousin Amygdala.

Icons can be useful things for all sorts of graphics. There is a big icon library call the Noun Project that might be useful for in poster design. Its splash page boasts that it has 150,000 icons. I gave it a whirl by searching for �crayfish,� because those have been on my mind:


Not bad. You have a choice of downloading PNG or vector based SVG images, and it�s all available under a Creative Commons license. I will forgive them that two of their icons are definitely crabs and not crayfish. Hat tip to Paige Jarreau.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has an album of songs from space. Fellow musician Jud Haynes (of Wintersleep) talks about the process of designing this cover.


Jud is an academic at heart:

I set out on the first phase of every good design project, �research�.

Hat tip to none other than the man himself, Chris Hadfield.

I�m a bit late to this article from two scientific illustrators talking about their craft. These guys are not doing literal interpretations of data, but they still want to get it right. Jon Hendrix says:

In my visual language, science is one of the easiest things to illustrate. There are so many nouns involved. The great thing with science, even in something as abstract as arithmetic, is there�s always some sort of image involved in it, and lots of stuff�whether it�s robots or plant material�that�s exciting to draw. It�s funny, sometimes when I do a science piece, I don�t have to draw things accurately, but I do want to value the science and the research.

Journal covers can have some similarities with posters: a big focus on key images and findings. Cell Press discusses how they pick their cover images: for the journal Neuron:


In particular:

(T)he editors have varying opinions within the team about what they prefer in a cover. Some like somewhat abstract images that require the viewer to stop and think about the connection between the visual and the experiment or idea it represents, and others prefer a beautiful scientific image over a metaphorical work of art. ... Images that look like simple reproductions of figures will most likely not be selected. In other words, no scale bars.

Rebranding a university is always tricky. I�m going through this process now. Penn State is doing this and has a new logo:. Compare the left (old) and right (new):


It hasn�t gone down well. I like the new Penn State logo in its overall design. The only problem is the eyes of the lion looks zombie-like, or, as one person said, �hypnotized.� But there isn�t much you can do about that when that is what the statue looks like:


I�d be a little creeped out having that on my campus.

Speaking of logos and rebranding, here�s an article about the creation of the distinctive NASA logo from the 70s.

Which conferences should you go to? You know, the location on the map doesn�t necessarily tell you about what the conference experience will be like. Jacquelyn Gill has some reflections on this based on her experiences with the Ecological Society of America conference:

I can attest that meeting location usually has little to do with the quality of amenities. Milwaukee, which had the lowest attendance in the last decade, is on a beautiful waterfront with lovely art deco architecture and great breweries. ... Portland and Albuquerque... were far from amenities and it was challenging to get to and from hotels and local restaurants. I hope more folks will realize this, and check out the places that aren�t as glamorous.

I wrote a guest post on the Edge for Scholars blog, describing the top three things you�re doing wrong on conference posters. Yes, I wrote and listicle, and yes, I feel dirty.

I�m also quoted in this article about the future of research conferences. The overarching theme seems to be that people want more interaction at conferences.

Senin, 03 Agustus 2015

Latest modern science | Archiving posters - Si Bejo Science


I�ve talked before about the long waits in getting projects published. But sometimes, despite waiting, projects never make it past the conference poster stage. I�ve also talked about developing a gut instinct for whether something is publishable.

It�s nice that now, there are ways to turn ephemera into an archival, potentially usable and citable, document. For a while, I�ve been meaning to start putting up some of my posters into FigShare, which I�ve been of fan of from early on. I first used it when I published a paper here on my blog. Since then, I�ve used it to archive the raw data for several of my papers as unofficial supplemental information.

The first one to go up is a poster I presented at the third International Tunicate Conference in 2005 at the University of California Santa Barbara.

This one is one of the relatively few projects that we were never able to push out into a paper. I still think it makes for a pretty good poster, though.

Archiving this poster got me thinking. I see clear value in archiving old posters that can document projects that never made it into the scientific literature. But is there value in archiving posters that were the early versions of projects that did make it into the regular scientific literature? I can see old posters have some interest as examples of design (see the Better Posters blog). They might eventually have some historical interest.

But is there any scientific interest in archiving old posters? Posters are generally works in progress, so tend to be incomplete and preliminary. Might they actually confuse matters by including dead end ideas that were abandoned by the authors?

Reference

Stwora A, Scofield VL, Faulkes Z. 2015. Effects of oxidative stress on Ascidia interrupta embryogenesis. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1499282

Crossposted from NeuroDojo.

Kamis, 25 Desember 2014

Latest modern science | Link roundup for December 2014 - Si Bejo Science

I�m always on the lookout for re-use of posters, and Gary McDowell takes advantage of the new fabric ones:



This poster scarf actually predates a similar one seen at Neuroscience by a few days:



Choosing the right title for your poster is critically important. This New Yorker article shows that the headline changes the way people remember the content of the story you tell them next:

In the case of the factual articles, a misleading headline hurt a reader�s ability to recall the article�s details. ... In the case of opinion articles, however, a misleading headline... impaired a reader�s ability to make accurate inferences.

Dr. Attai took this picture at American Society of Clinical Oncology 2014 meeting. Um. Aren�t people proud of their work?


NatC has a conference networking tip:

New conference networking strategy: share cab to airport with strangers. Get career advice.

I constantly harp on people to make a grid. Here is a useful slide deck showing how grids are used to design a complex website (hat tip to Duarte and Garr Reynolds):



Kirsten Sanford nominated this as her favourite poster from the American Geological Union meeting. It�s colourful, I�ll give it that.



Business cards are an integral part of conference networking. Erik Peterson turned his business cards into mini-posters:


Slideshare has a video that claims to tell you four tips for making data visualization memorable (hat tip to Ethos 3):


The cheat sheet summary is below; the original paper is here:

  1. They look like something natural.
  2. Are pictoral.
  3. Use colours.
  4. Have high visual density.

Typeset in the Future is an obsessive single serve blog looking at typography in science fiction films. Try this post on Alien for starters. Hat tip to Adam Savage. (The mythbuster also throws in his favourite typefaces: Futura and Caslon.)

Before and After talks about using colour to make connections between objects. Very useful to remember in designing posters, and displaying data.

Here�s a fun article about secrets hidden in plain sight in logos. I knew a couple, like the FedEx arrow, but there were lots that I didn�t know.


Note, though, that the article gets the story behind the BMW logo wrong (it�s not a propellor). But perhaps it can be forgiven, as BMW�s own histories have sometimes mucked up the truth!


Merry Christmas!