Are Conference Posters Being Cited?

Nick Haupka,Cäcilia Schröer,Christian Hauschke

doi:10.3389/frma.2021.766552

Nick Haupka, Cäcilia Schröer + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.766552

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Abstract

We present a small case study on citations of conference posters using poster collections from both Figshare and Zenodo. The study takes into account the years 2016–2020 according to the dates of publication on the platforms. Citation data was taken from DataCite, Crossref and Dimensions. Primarily, we want to know to what extent scientific posters are being cited and thereby which impact posters potentially have on the scholarly landscape and especially on academic publications. Our data-driven analysis reveals that posters are rarely cited. Citations could only be found for 1% of the posters in our dataset. A limitation in this study however is that the impact of academic posters was not measured empirical but rather descriptive.

Highlights

The output that is analyzed in scientometric analysis oftentimes consists of conventional publication types like academic articles, monographs or papers in conference proceedings
It is remarkable that another traditional means of scholarly communication, the academic poster, barely gets any attention when it comes to scientometric analysis (Rowe 2017a)
For our analysis we didn’t differentiate between self-citations and other citations, as we wanted to investigate whether posters are cited at all

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The output that is analyzed in scientometric analysis oftentimes consists of conventional publication types like academic articles, monographs or papers in conference proceedings. Each poster merely gives information on the purpose of the study carried out by the researcher, a description of the used tools and procedures, a major conclusion as well as implications for research (Sexton 1984). These information are enriched with pictures and other visually stimulating elements to attract the attention of conference attendees. Further studies supported the idea of presenting research findings in the form of a poster and came to the conclusion that poster sessions can be a substitution and alternative to the traditional approach of reading research articles (Sexton 1984). Not a single study vetted the ramification of scientific posters on academic publishing, especially through scientometric data mining

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