Research poster examples by study design

What each design has to put up front

The cohort board shows follow up and the incidence in each group before the hazard ratio. The case control board puts the odds ratios for six exposures in a table with their intervals. The cross sectional board reports prevalence by group and is careful not to claim a cause. The randomised trial board shows how many were screened, randomised and analysed before the primary outcome. The qualitative board names its sample and reports themes with short quotes and counts. The mixed methods board places the numbers and the interviews in one joint display. The meta analysis board gives the pooled effect, the heterogeneity and the subgroups. The controlled experiment, field trial, simulation study and capstone project boards each show the setup, the comparison and what was measured.

Reporting standards in poster form

Most of these designs have a reporting guideline, such as CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational studies and PRISMA for reviews, and each board keeps the items a reader checks first from its guideline. The arithmetic holds throughout: flow counts subtract correctly, percentages match their counts and intervals follow from the data. Some block headings belong to the design rather than the study, so a flow block may be headed participant flow over farms or a protocol block may print over a finished experiment, and each page names what its blocks really hold. There are no error bars, so intervals are written in the text.

Choosing the closest board

Start from your design, not your subject, because a cohort study of sleep and a cohort study of shift work need the same layout. Five boards are portrait and six are landscape; two are Australian. Every study, institution and author is invented, so take the structure and replace the numbers with your own.

Every page in this collection

• Capstone project poster example

  A capstone project poster shows a thing that was built and tested against a target set at the start. This A0 portrait example comes from a final year engineering team of four and their supervisor: a $38 clip on camera that reads old water meters, tested on 1,600 photos of three meter models, reading 1,539 correctly, 96.2% against a 95% target.

• Case control study poster example

  A case control study poster lives or dies on its exposure table, because every odds ratio has to rebuild from the counts beside it. This A0 landscape example compares 210 adults treated for kitchen burns with 420 controls matched on age across six exposures. Loose sleeves carry the largest odds ratio, 2.8, 95% CI 1.9 to 4.2.

• Cohort study poster example

  A cohort study poster has to show change over time in the same people, so the follow up waves carry the board. This A0 landscape example follows 2,400 hospital and factory workers for six years, 1,200 on rotating shifts and 1,200 on day work, and reports new hypertension with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.5, 95% CI 1.2 to 1.9.

• Controlled experiment poster example

  A controlled experiment poster has to show that one thing changed and everything else was held fixed. This A0 portrait example grows 288 lettuce plants in 12 trays under three LED spectra for five weeks in one chamber. From the same 0.8 g start, the red heavy spectrum ends at 118 g a plant against 96 g under balanced white, 23% more.

• Cross sectional study poster example

  A cross sectional study poster reports how common something is at one moment, so its headline is a prevalence, not a change. This A0 landscape example surveys 3,600 students in 22 Queensland secondary schools in one week: 38% sleep under 8 hours on a school night, and short sleep is 1.9 times as common above 4 hours of recreational screen time.

• Field trial poster example

  A field trial poster reports a treatment applied on working land, so it needs the layout, the replication and the yield in one place. This A0 landscape example spreads biochar at 0, 5 and 10 tonnes a hectare in 75 strips on five New South Wales grazing farms for two seasons. Pasture rises from 5.1 to 5.8 t a hectare, 14% at the high rate.

• Meta analysis poster example

  A meta analysis poster carries a pooled estimate, so it has to show the trials that built it and how much they disagree. This A0 portrait example pools 18 randomised trials of structured exercise in 2,140 adults with depressive symptoms: standardised mean difference minus 0.42, 95% CI minus 0.54 to minus 0.30, I squared 46%.

• Mixed methods study poster example

  A mixed methods study poster must show both strands and, more important, where they meet. This A0 landscape example uses an explanatory sequential design: records for 14,200 clinic visits show waits peaking at 41 minutes at 3 pm, then 30 patient interviews explain why, and a three row joint display ties each theme to the pattern it explains.

• Qualitative study poster example

  A qualitative study poster has to let the participants speak in a few words and still show how far each theme reached. This A0 portrait example reports 36 interviews with unpaid family carers about getting respite: four themes, each with one quote under 30 words and a count, led by respite as a fight in 28 of 36 interviews.

• Randomised controlled trial poster example

  A randomised controlled trial poster must let a reader follow every participant and find the primary outcome with its interval. This A0 portrait board reports a behavioural trial of a sleep app against written advice in 240 adults: insomnia scores fell 3.3 points more with the app, 95% CI 1.9 to 4.7, with the flow from 318 screened to 221 analysed.

• Simulation study poster example

  A simulation study poster must say what the model assumes as clearly as what it found. This A0 landscape example runs an agent based evacuation model of a 1,200 seat hall under four exit layouts, 500 runs each. Adding a fourth exit at the rear cuts mean clearance from 212 to 168 seconds, 21% faster, and the 95th percentile from 251 to 192. Four model limits sit right beside that headline.