Conferences

Why present at a conference?

Conferences are one of the main ways that scientists disseminate their work. When researchers submit to a conference, they usually submit a poster or paper which is peer reviewed. If accepted, the submitter is invited to attend a conference (usually for a fee) and present the work.

While conference presentations are great because they go on your CV as either a presentation or a publication, conferences are especially useful for meeting people. There is no better way to make connections to other researchers in your field. They're also a lot of fun!

Rules Around Submitting to Conferences

Liek papers, everyone who made a significant contribution to a research project should be recognized with authorship. While typically a conference presentation (talk or poster) is presented by one individual (the first author), everyone who contributed should be listed as an author. Authorship discusssions are best held at the start of a project, but the list of authors should be included in any draft of an abstract that you submit to your supervisor/the team for review, and on the actual conference submission.

The most important thing to understand is that any scientific work that is generated by a group of individuals should never be shared without the explicit consent of those individuals – or at least reasonable opportunity to provide consent. Some people in academia take this more seriously than others, but I have seen people face disciplinary action for submitting a conference abstract without first getting approval of all co-authors. There are numerous reasons for this, but they are largely rooted in scientific integrity – if someone’s name is associated with particular work, then everyone who sees that association assumes that all individuals stand behind the validity of the work and the conclusions/interpretations derived from it. At the extreme, individuals could end up being seen as guilty of scientific fraud if their names were associated with fraudulent work that they didn’t have the opportunity to approve (obviously not a concern here, but a general operating principle).

Note that “reasonable opportunity” recognizes that not everyone may always respond in a timely fashion. Regardless, at the very least you need to provide a reasonable amount of time, ideally 2 weeks but at least 1 week, for people to respond. Further, the deadline should be clearly stated when you ask for feedback/approval.

Furthermore, submitting exactly the same written work to more than one venue can be plagiarism. This depends largely on the rules of the journals/conferences that are submitted to (and certainly it’s expected that conference presentations eventually become journal articles describing the same work). But it’s best practice to at least modify the title and abstract wording somewhat – and in some cases, even presenting the same study at multiple conferences can be considered self-plagiarism. This should be discussed with your supervisor (if not the whole author team) in advance.

Which conferences do we usually attend?

There are many! We tend to attend conferences that are in our areas of interest, though not necessarily conferences that are specific to neuroscience. For instance, some of the conferences that we have attended (e.g. CHI) are well-outside of Neuroscience, but useful because it exposed us to a larger diversity of collaborators. Some of the conferences that we have frequented the last few years are:

• Human Brain Mapping

• Neurobiology of Language

• Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS)

• The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS)

• The Neuro Information Systems Retreat

• ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

How to give a talk

The most effective academic presentations often follow the spirit of the "10-20-30 Rule", as described by Guy Kawasaki. These presentations are so-called because they are:

• Have no more than 10 slides

• Are no more than 20 minutes long

• Have at least thirty-point font

I say "modified" because it is often unrealistic to do some of these things in the amount of time and given and under academic expectations. A good rule of thumb is that an excellent academic talk:

• Tells a story

• Emphasises two or three key points

• Makes great use of visualizations

• Makes minimal use of text

• Uses a roadmap

Posters

Posters are a form of conference presentation in which your results are on a poster (somewhere between 3x4 and 4x8 feet in size) which you stand beside, and you give a ~5 minute "spiel" to anyone who comes by and is interested in hearing more. Posters are a somewhat weird format because on the one hand, you should be there explaining it - so the content should be largely visual and support your words - but on the other hand you may not always be there (and often you provide a takeaway hard copy (8.5x11) or PDF, so the poster needs to have enough words and content that someone can understand it without your verbal explanation.

When the lab is presenting multiple posters at the same conference, there is value in sharing a consistent graphical style and colour scheme. We normally have a poster template around if you ask senior lab members, though it evolves over time.

Here are two great resources on developing a scientific poster:

• How to Prepare a Scientific Poster

• How Do You Make Your First Scientific Poster?

How Much time Does it Take to Make a Poster?

This is really important. In the Science article linked above, they asked academics "How much time and planning do you usually dedicate to preparing a poster?" - and the answers are generally quantified in weeks. Just because a poster is a single page doesn't mean that a good one can be put together quickly. In fact, in many. ways it's harder to create an effective presentation in this format because you need to be very selective about how you use the limited space. You can expect to go through several rounds of drafts and revisions.

Contents of a Poster

The title bar of your poster should contain:

• Poster title exactly as it appeared in your original submission

• List of authors

• Affiliations of each author, including Department name, university name, city, province, country

• Email address of first/corresponding author (this could alternatively be in the bottom right are of the poster, along with your QR code - see below)

• Logo of each university that authors are affiliated with (top right corner of poster)

A copy of your final poster should be saved on the NCIL server, in the project folder for your study.

Sharing copies of your poster at the conference

It's pretty standard to provide a copy of the poster. Many people still print 8.5x11" hard copies, but these are often hard to read since the poster is made to be much larger. I prefer to provide a PDF copy. (You can also do both). The best way to do this is:

• Export a copy of your poster from PowerPoint or Keynote (or whatever) to PDF

• Check the file size of this. 1-2 Mb is OK, but if it's 20 MB you should reduce the file size.

• Put the poster someone sensible on the NCIL server (e.g., in a "Documents" subfolder of the project folder, and ideally within there, in a folder specifically for this conference)

• Log on to NCILNAS via web browser. Navigate to the PDF of your poster. Right-click on the PDF and select "Share" (bottom option) from the pop-up menu

• You may want to select a "validity period" so that after a certain date (say, a month or two after the conference), the sharing link is no longer active.

• Click "get QR code"

• Right-click on the QR code and select "copy image", then paste the image into your poster in Powerpoint.

• Note that the PDF will not have the QR code since you exported the PDF prior to making the QR code. This isn't really a problem since people need the QR code to get the PDF in the first place, however.

• Confirm, using your phone camera, that scanning the QR code does link to the poster PDF

It's also pretty common to provide a blank piece of paper next to your poster for people to write emails on, if they want you to send a copy instead of scanning the QR.

Conference papers

Some conferences (usually in computer science or engineering) require papers to be submitted which are archived in the conference proceedings. In most of the computer science subfields, for example, academic conference proceedings are often the most prestigious and highest impact venues. The Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference proceedings, for example, had an impact factor (IF) of 42.3 in 2021, which is just below Science (IF: 47.7) and just above Cell (IF: 41.8).

Clearly, certain conferences are desirable venues for our publications. Should you present at a conference with published proceedings papers, be sure to consider the venue as if you would any other publication.