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 (t
7 = -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:
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