EMS2025: What poster presenters had to say

A big thank you to all the poster presenters who gave us feedback on the poster sessions, poster area, poster pitches and other aspects around poster presentations!

Of the 190 poster presenters at EMS 2025, 45 provided feedback. Of these, 80% submitted their abstract with a preference to show their work in a poster while 11% would have preferred to give a talk during the lectures.

Below are a few salient results from our survey.

We asked the poster presenters what was their main reason to submitted their abstract with poster presentation preference; there are a wealth of interesting answers :

This is work in progress …

Still early stages of research topic

The topic is more suitable for a poster

The work is not yet completed so I presented just some preliminary results

I was a first time attendee as a new PhD student.

How would you rate the location of the poster boards?

Do you think the poster area was good for discussing your work in front of your poster?

Almost 80% said yes, but 20% were not fully happy and provided a number of comments:

• The posters were too close to each other – when multiple presenters were attending their posters next to each other, there was limited space.
• It depends on where your poster was (inner corridor or not).
• I think the poster panels were too close to each other, which makes it more complicated to hear the people we were talking to and to show the poster without disturbing the person next to us.
• It was the ideal case.
• There was too little space between each poster, so I could only talk to one person at a time. I had to take care not to stand in front of my neighbours’ poster.
• There was enough space to talk to a few people. More room would have been better though.
• It was a little too less space if the poster was mounted in the middle of the two walls. Further the neighbour posters were very close so that standing next to it, already covered the view on the neighbour poster.
• The presence of refreshments nearby encouraged attendance.

Was the length of time the posters were on display during the event sufficient?

Length of poster session

• I think it should have been a bit longer.
• Presenting a poster longer, I tend to get exhausted if there is a lot of interest. Less time would probably cut discussions short.
• I didn’t have time to talk to everyone that came by my poster.
• For that many posters a little more time would have been nice.
• Now for this one, I think the amount dedicated for poster sessions was a bit low, so there was hardly enough time to engage with the poster presenters. As a presenter, 1h 15min is comfortable, but maybe 2h would have been a bit more productive.
• Timing of poster sessions is always a problem, if you stand at your own poster all the time ready for discussions you may miss the chance to discuss with authors of other posters. But this cannot be solved by the length of the poster session.

Poster pitches

• A great way to reach the potential audience.
• It was a good advertisement for the poster and a few people came especially following the pitch.
• There was a poster pitch, but it was not scheduled per se – it was inserted in a time slot left by someone who cancelled their oral presentation.
• I think it is great to be able to present the gist of the poster to a broader audience. I also enjoy seeing poster pitches.
• Great opportunity.
• I think it’s a good way to draw attention to your poster so that interested people will come by.
• I wanted to try the 1 minute presentation, that was an interesting format.
• To attract more visitors to my poster.
• I love to share my points.
• I think it is better way to be more visible and disseminate the results. And also good practice for me.
• It is helpful to let people who are interested in a topic, that there will be a poster belonging to that topic – it is a very nice way to connect people who otherwise might not know about the posters (it’s so many posters, I haven’t seen many)
• I think it is a good opportunity to advertise the work in a short presentation. Further, for the audience it is possible to judge whether or not this topic is interesting and so more time for other posters remain.

Thanks again to all the valuable feedback. We hope to address some of the points in the organisation of the EMS2026 in Utrecht.

The competing interests, however  – longer poster sessions versus enough time for every one with a preference for an oral presentation – will again provide a challenge.