Poster Posters, individual sections

The second audience comprises conference attendees, who read abstracts to determine whose talk to attend or poster to view. Because national conferences typically have multiple concurrent sessions, attendees rely on abstracts to make their decisions about what sessions to attend, where to go, and when. Individuals who read your abstract are likely to be in a related field of chemistry, but most likely will not be in your specific area of chemistry. Thus, it is important to keep your abstract general enough to be readily understood across different areas of science, thereby targeting primarily a scientific audience. In this regard, the conference abstract is more similar to the Introduction section of a journal article than to the abstract of a journal article, the latter written for an expert audience. 

The poster text is divided into the same general IMRD sections as the journal article Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Similarly, most posters include an Acknowledgments section, some have an abbreviated References section, and all have a title and author list. Most posters do not include an abstract, in part because of space limitations and in part because an abstract already appears in the conference proceedings. Like the journal article, the IMRD structure of the poster follows an hourglass shape. The top (Introduction) and bottom (Discussion) sections have a broader focus, while the middle sections (Methods and Results) have a narrower focus. Each section of the poster can be divided into individual moves or steps that guide viewers in a conventional way through the content of each section. These moves are analyzed in the next part of the chapter. 

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