Posterized!

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the challenges and advantages of writing a poster paper about the corner stone of my PhD thesis: the theoretical model.

Now, a bit more than a week after I got the confirmation that all my papers got accepted, I start to slowly realize what a great achievement this is. Not only that I managed to get three papers ready in time, I also wrote them in such a good quality that they all seemed convincing enough to be accepted. Unfortunately, my theoretical model was not good or interesting enough to be accepted as a full paper and so I was challenged again to present my model in a different form.

As I was preparing the poster version of it, I realized two strange things. On the one hand, I could present all of the most relevant information in a very condensed form on two pages. That’s a thing I would have regarded as impossible as I wrote the initial full paper version of it. Of course, this was not an easy task as it required a lot of abbreviations to fit everything into the article: a comprehensive introduction, the model’s description, the central graphic representing my model, and the references. On the other hand, despite being able to fit the most important information on those two pages, it is very sad that all the other related work can be neglected to define my model.

However, neglecting the additional information comes to a high price: I think the poster version has lost a lot of the clarity and completeness of the full paper version. Also, it is very difficult to provide examples for certain elements of the framework, when there is no room for it. Of course, it was an interesting challenge as I was required to write very concise and only focus on the most important facts and elements. Also, I am happy that I can explain my model on at least two pages which seems to me like another achievement. But, despite all this scientific training, I still have some kind of artist inside of me who likes to present and tell a good story.

In the end, being able to finally publish my model in a poster form opens so many new possibilities as I finally can reference it in all my future publications. Also, when it comes to telling a story, I can at least present the entire story in my PhD thesis, if I do not get the chance to publish a full paper of my model in the near future. Suddenly, everything seems to be doable again.