Abstract
The Royal Society of Chemistry held, to our knowledge, the world’s first Twitter conference at 9am on February 5 th, 2015. The conference was a Twitter-only conference, allowing researchers to upload academic posters as tweets, replacing a physical meeting. This paper reports the details of the event and discusses the outcomes, such as the potential for the use of social media to enhance scientific communication at conferences. In particular, the present work argues that social media outlets such as Twitter broaden audiences, speed up communication, and force clearer and more concise descriptions of a researcher’s work. The benefits of poster presentations are also discussed in terms of potential knowledge exchange and networking. This paper serves as a proof-of-concept approach for improving both the public opinion of the poster, and the enhancement of the poster through an innovative online format that some may feel more comfortable with, compared to face-to-face communication.
Highlights
An academic conference should be a symposium where academics can report, share, discuss their work, and exchange ideas through a variety of different communication methods
This paper presents findings from the world’s first Twitter poster conference, organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and discusses the potential impact of social media upon the academic poster
This further presents opportunities for researchers to exchange comments in the form of tweets, a format that is designed to be both clear and concise. Such communiqués encourage researchers to think more directly about their research, as they must communicate their point in 140 characters or less. This concise form of communication could help both students and academics to communicate more effectively, students who sometimes struggle to differentiate between description and analysis (Chanock, 2000)
Summary
An academic conference should be a symposium where academics can report, share, discuss their work, and exchange ideas through a variety of different communication methods. A typical academic conference may consist of several oral presentations, including those from keynote or plenary speakers, in addition to a number of workshops, which offer a more interactive method of delivery. It could be argued that if knowledge exchange is the fundamental purpose of a conference, which it is, posters and workshops are far more valuable than oral presentations (Rowe & Ilic, 2009); in which case, are posters being unfairly discredited?. The “all eyes on one” style of oral presentations is extremely limiting in terms of opportunities for the speaker to interact personally with members of the audience. Aside from this, the less intimidating nature of poster sessions may be preferable to a larger percentage of researchers, which might explain why the poster presentation saw large increases in the 1990s (Moule et al, 1998)
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