How many figures on a research poster? 50 boards counted

Most research posters carry one figure. Counted on 21 September 2026 across the 50 finished A0 research poster examples on this site, 39 boards have exactly one numbered figure, nine have two, one has three and one has four, 64 figures in all. Column charts are 52 of the 64. The corpus is this site’s own set of boards for fictional studies, and it grows as boards are added, so read the counts as a description of finished work in several disciplines, not a survey of conference posters.

What was counted

The 50 boards cover seventeen health and clinical studies, fifteen in the social sciences, thirteen in the natural and physical sciences, three in engineering and computing, and two student boards: a thesis defence and an undergraduate project. 30 are portrait at 1656 by 2340 pixels, 20 landscape at 2340 by 1656. Each is stored as the finished HTML of the board.

Two things were counted on each board:

• Figures, as numbered captions that begin “Figure 1”, “Figure 2” and so on. Participant flow diagrams, protocol blocks and key number panels are not counted as figures, because the boards do not number them.
• Charts, as the chart drawings themselves, with their kind read from how they are drawn: bars with rounded ends that share a baseline on the left are horizontal bars, rounded bars that rise from the bottom are columns, and unfilled lines with plotted points are line charts. There are 64 charts and 64 figures, because every figure on every board is now a chart.

The area of each figure block, caption included, was also measured as a share of the whole board. The table below this article gives the counts by discipline group.

Figures by discipline

The median is one figure in every discipline group except the two student boards, which carry two each. Health and clinical boards average 1.29, the social sciences 1.27, the natural sciences 1.23 and engineering exactly one. Discipline changes the amount of text far more than the number of figures: the natural science boards have the longest median text, 702 words, and the health boards 587, yet both settle on one figure. More writing, in other words, does not bring more charts.

The multi figure boards are nearly all portrait. 10 of the 30 portrait boards carry two or more, against one of the 20 landscape boards. A portrait board stacks columns deep enough for a second chart below the first; a landscape board usually spends its width on a results band beside a single chart.

The two boards with more than two figures are both outcome studies with several questions to answer. The criminology cohort runs to four: reoffending by pathway, then by prior record, then by month of follow up, then the make up of the matched pairs. The veterinary audit runs to three. Each figure answers a different question, which is the only good reason for a third.

The chart kinds that appear

Of the 64 charts, 52 are columns, 9 are horizontal bars and 3 are lines. No board uses a pie, donut, radar, waterfall or waffle chart, even though a chart figure on an A0 layout offers ten kinds.

The choice follows the claim. Columns compare groups: incidence by region on the epidemiology poster, hours before and after on the economics board. Lines show change along a continuous axis: the decay curves on the physics board, the dose response on the lab findings poster. Horizontal bars carry long category labels: the health economics board uses one for a one way sensitivity analysis, where each bar is a named model input.

That restraint is what poster guidance asks for. Edward Tufte’s argument for spending ink on data rather than decoration matters more on a board read at arm’s length than in a journal, and the Clemson graduate symposium rubric scores whether “graphs, tables and illustrations are engaging and enhance understanding” as one of eight criteria.

How much of the board the main figure takes

On most boards the figure is modest. The median largest figure block covers 10 percent of the board area, caption and source line included. On a 841 by 1189 millimetre sheet that is still a figure the size of a large book.

Six boards break the pattern completely. On the lab findings, physics, machine learning, astronomy, archaeology and sports science boards, one figure takes 20 to 37 percent of the board. All six are built on layouts designed around a single dominant figure, and their median text is 497 words against 659 on the other 44. Five of the six are portrait and one landscape, so a hero figure is not tied to one orientation.

The pattern is a choice between two kinds of poster. A board where the finding is a shape, a curve that bends or a gap that opens, can let the chart carry it and cut about 180 words. A board where the finding is a set of comparisons keeps a modest chart and more text.

Tables against charts

Five boards are built on table led or comparison layouts: economics, health economics, agriculture, education and media studies. Every one of the five still carries one chart. The table holds the values a reader might want to look up, such as costs per patient, yield by variety or the two arms side by side; the chart holds the one comparison the board wants remembered. None of the five captions its table as a figure, which is why the table does not appear in the figure count.

One limitation is worth noting. Seven image figure blocks on four A0 layouts have no upload control, so they cannot be filled with a photograph. The mosaic, photo band and sidebar boards in this set carry charts in those blocks instead, which is why every figure counted here is a chart.

Journal figure rules make a useful check before any chart goes on a board. PLOS ONE, for example, asks for figure text in 8 to 12 point at final size. On an A0 board, where one canvas pixel prints at 1.44 points, the same readability rule means axis labels several times larger.

A figure plan for your poster

1. Start with one figure that shows the main finding, and write its caption as the finding.
2. Add a second only for a different question, a subgroup, a dose or a time course, and only on a portrait board with room to stack it.
3. Pick the chart by the claim: columns to compare groups, a line for change over a continuous axis, horizontal bars for long labels.
4. Decide whether the finding is a shape. If it is, give that chart a fifth of the board and cut the text to around 750 words.
5. Keep lookup values in a table and the remembered comparison in the chart.

For how many words the rest of the board should carry, see how many words on a research poster, and for the choice of board shape see landscape vs portrait poster.

How to use this plan

The scientific poster maker page shows the two A0 canvases and the blocks a board is built from, including the figure block. To put a chart or diagram onto a design and fill it with your own values, follow adding charts and diagrams, which uses the same builder as posters. The epidemiology poster is a clean model of a one figure landscape board.