Posters are intended to spark scientific dialogue and omnipresent at biological conferences. Guides and how-to articles help life scientists in preparing informative visualizations in poster format. However, those posters shown at conferences are at present often overloaded with data and text and are poorly designed, which in sum hinder, rather than spark communication. Here, we surveyed life scientists themselves to understand why posters are such a struggle and to shed light on poster preparation from their subjective perspectives. We find that biologist spend on average two entire days preparing one poster, with half of the time devoted to visual design aspects. Most respond that they receive no design or software training and also receive little to no feedback when preparing their visualizations. In conclusion, our data suggests that some training, beyond providing literature, of life scientists in visualization principles and tools would likely improve conference poster quality. In addition, this would also improve other common visuals such as figures and slides, and thus overall benefit the science communication of researchers.

中文翻译：

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对生命科学海报准备实践的见解

海报旨在激发科学对话并在生物学会议上无处不在。指南和操作方法文章可帮助生命科学家准备海报格式的信息可视化。然而，目前在会议上展示的那些海报往往数据和文本过多，而且设计不佳，总而言之，这阻碍了而不是激发交流。在这里，我们调查了生命科学家本身，以了解为什么海报如此困难，并从他们的主观角度阐明海报的准备工作。我们发现生物学家平均花费整整两天时间准备一张海报，其中一半时间用于视觉设计方面。大多数人回答说，他们没有接受过设计或软件培训，并且在准备可视化时也几乎没有收到任何反馈。综上所述，我们的数据表明，除了提供文献外，对生命科学家进行可视化原理和工具方面的一些培训可能会提高会议海报的质量。此外，这也将改善其他常见的视觉效果，例如图形和幻灯片，从而整体上有利于研究人员的科学交流。