google scholar paper presentation

Reference management. Clean and simple.

Google Scholar: the ultimate guide

What is Google Scholar?

Why is google scholar better than google for finding research papers, the google scholar search results page, the first two lines: core bibliographic information, quick full text-access options, "cited by" count and other useful links, tips for searching google scholar, 1. google scholar searches are not case sensitive, 2. use keywords instead of full sentences, 3. use quotes to search for an exact match, 3. add the year to the search phrase to get articles published in a particular year, 4. use the side bar controls to adjust your search result, 5. use boolean operator to better control your searches, google scholar advanced search interface, customizing search preferences and options, using the "my library" feature in google scholar, the scope and limitations of google scholar, alternatives to google scholar, country-specific google scholar sites, frequently asked questions about google scholar, related articles.

Google Scholar (GS) is a free academic search engine that can be thought of as the academic version of Google. Rather than searching all of the indexed information on the web, it searches repositories of:

• universities
• scholarly websites

This is generally a smaller subset of the pool that Google searches. It's all done automatically, but most of the search results tend to be reliable scholarly sources.

However, Google is typically less careful about what it includes in search results than more curated, subscription-based academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science . As a result, it is important to take some time to assess the credibility of the resources linked through Google Scholar.

➡️ Take a look at our guide on the best academic databases .

One advantage of using Google Scholar is that the interface is comforting and familiar to anyone who uses Google. This lowers the learning curve of finding scholarly information .

There are a number of useful differences from a regular Google search. Google Scholar allows you to:

• copy a formatted citation in different styles including MLA and APA
• export bibliographic data (BibTeX, RIS) to use with reference management software
• explore other works have cited the listed work
• easily find full text versions of the article

Although it is free to search in Google Scholar, most of the content is not freely available. Google does its best to find copies of restricted articles in public repositories. If you are at an academic or research institution, you can also set up a library connection that allows you to see items that are available through your institution.

The Google Scholar results page differs from the Google results page in a few key ways. The search result page is, however, different and it is worth being familiar with the different pieces of information that are shown. Let's have a look at the results for the search term "machine learning.”

• The first line of each result provides the title of the document (e.g. of an article, book, chapter, or report).
• The second line provides the bibliographic information about the document, in order: the author(s), the journal or book it appears in, the year of publication, and the publisher.

Clicking on the title link will bring you to the publisher’s page where you may be able to access more information about the document. This includes the abstract and options to download the PDF.

To the far right of the entry are more direct options for obtaining the full text of the document. In this example, Google has also located a publicly available PDF of the document hosted at umich.edu . Note, that it's not guaranteed that it is the version of the article that was finally published in the journal.

Below the text snippet/abstract you can find a number of useful links.

• Cited by : the cited by link will show other articles that have cited this resource. That is a super useful feature that can help you in many ways. First, it is a good way to track the more recent research that has referenced this article, and second the fact that other researches cited this document lends greater credibility to it. But be aware that there is a lag in publication type. Therefore, an article published in 2017 will not have an extensive number of cited by results. It takes a minimum of 6 months for most articles to get published, so even if an article was using the source, the more recent article has not been published yet.
• Versions : this link will display other versions of the article or other databases where the article may be found, some of which may offer free access to the article.
• Quotation mark icon : this will display a popup with commonly used citation formats such as MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and Vancouver that may be copied and pasted. Note, however, that the Google Scholar citation data is sometimes incomplete and so it is often a good idea to check this data at the source. The "cite" popup also includes links for exporting the citation data as BibTeX or RIS files that any major reference manager can import.

Pro tip: Use a reference manager like Paperpile to keep track of all your sources. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular academic research engines and databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons and later cite them in thousands of citation styles:

Although Google Scholar limits each search to a maximum of 1,000 results , it's still too much to explore, and you need an effective way of locating the relevant articles. Here’s a list of pro tips that will help you save time and search more effectively.

You don’t need to worry about case sensitivity when you’re using Google scholar. In other words, a search for "Machine Learning" will produce the same results as a search for "machine learning.”

Let's say your research topic is about self driving cars. For a regular Google search we might enter something like " what is the current state of the technology used for self driving cars ". In Google Scholar, you will see less than ideal results for this query .

The trick is to build a list of keywords and perform searches for them like self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, or driverless cars. Google Scholar will assist you on that: if you start typing in the search field you will see related queries suggested by Scholar!

If you put your search phrase into quotes you can search for exact matches of that phrase in the title and the body text of the document. Without quotes, Google Scholar will treat each word separately.

This means that if you search national parks , the words will not necessarily appear together. Grouped words and exact phrases should be enclosed in quotation marks.

A search using “self-driving cars 2015,” for example, will return articles or books published in 2015.

Using the options in the left hand panel you can further restrict the search results by limiting the years covered by the search, the inclusion or exclude of patents, and you can sort the results by relevance or by date.

Searches are not case sensitive, however, there are a number of Boolean operators you can use to control the search and these must be capitalized.

• AND requires both of the words or phrases on either side to be somewhere in the record.
• NOT can be placed in front of a word or phrases to exclude results which include them.
• OR will give equal weight to results which match just one of the words or phrases on either side.

➡️ Read more about how to efficiently search online databases for academic research .

In case you got overwhelmed by the above options, here’s some illustrative examples:

Tip: Use the advanced search features in Google Scholar to narrow down your search results.

You can gain even more fine-grained control over your search by using the advanced search feature. This feature is available by clicking on the hamburger menu in the upper left and selecting the "Advanced search" menu item.

Adjusting the Google Scholar settings is not necessary for getting good results, but offers some additional customization, including the ability to enable the above-mentioned library integrations.

The settings menu is found in the hamburger menu located in the top left of the Google Scholar page. The settings are divided into five sections:

• Collections to search: by default Google scholar searches articles and includes patents, but this default can be changed if you are not interested in patents or if you wish to search case law instead.
• Bibliographic manager: you can export relevant citation data via the “Bibliography manager” subsection.
• Languages: if you wish for results to return only articles written in a specific subset of languages, you can define that here.
• Library links: as noted, Google Scholar allows you to get the Full Text of articles through your institution’s subscriptions, where available. Search for, and add, your institution here to have the relevant link included in your search results.
• Button: the Scholar Button is a Chrome extension which adds a dropdown search box to your toolbar. This allows you to search Google Scholar from any website. Moreover, if you have any text selected on the page and then click the button it will display results from a search on those words when clicked.

When signed in, Google Scholar adds some simple tools for keeping track of and organizing the articles you find. These can be useful if you are not using a full academic reference manager.

All the search results include a “save” button at the end of the bottom row of links, clicking this will add it to your "My Library".

To help you provide some structure, you can create and apply labels to the items in your library. Appended labels will appear at the end of the article titles. For example, the following article has been assigned a “RNA” label:

Within your Google Scholar library, you can also edit the metadata associated with titles. This will often be necessary as Google Scholar citation data is often faulty.

There is no official statement about how big the Scholar search index is, but unofficial estimates are in the range of about 160 million , and it is supposed to continue to grow by several million each year.

Yet, Google Scholar does not return all resources that you may get in search at you local library catalog. For example, a library database could return podcasts, videos, articles, statistics, or special collections. For now, Google Scholar has only the following publication types:

• Journal articles : articles published in journals. It's a mixture of articles from peer reviewed journals, predatory journals and pre-print archives.
• Books : links to the Google limited version of the text, when possible.
• Book chapters : chapters within a book, sometimes they are also electronically available.
• Book reviews : reviews of books, but it is not always apparent that it is a review from the search result.
• Conference proceedings : papers written as part of a conference, typically used as part of presentation at the conference.
• Court opinions .
• Patents : Google Scholar only searches patents if the option is selected in the search settings described above.

The information in Google Scholar is not cataloged by professionals. The quality of the metadata will depend heavily on the source that Google Scholar is pulling the information from. This is a much different process to how information is collected and indexed in scholarly databases such as Scopus or Web of Science .

➡️ Visit our list of the best academic databases .

Google Scholar is by far the most frequently used academic search engine , but it is not the only one. Other academic search engines include:

• Science.gov
• Semantic Scholar
• scholar.google.fr : Sur les épaules d'un géant
• scholar.google.es (Google Académico): A hombros de gigantes
• scholar.google.pt (Google Académico): Sobre os ombros de gigantes
• scholar.google.de : Auf den Schultern von Riesen

➡️ Once you’ve found some research, it’s time to read it. Take a look at our guide on how to read a scientific paper .

No. Google Scholar is a bibliographic search engine rather than a bibliographic database. In order to qualify as a database Google Scholar would need to have stable identifiers for its records.

No. Google Scholar is an academic search engine, but the records found in Google Scholar are scholarly sources.

No. Google Scholar collects research papers from all over the web, including grey literature and non-peer reviewed papers and reports.

Google Scholar does not provide any full text content itself, but links to the full text article on the publisher page, which can either be open access or paywalled content. Google Scholar tries to provide links to free versions, when possible.

The easiest way to access Google scholar is by using The Google Scholar Button. This is a browser extension that allows you easily access Google Scholar from any web page. You can install it from the Chrome Webstore .

Thomas Vanhoutte

Personal website and blog

Submit academic research paper to Google Scholar

You have worked many months to complete your thesis or academic paper and you have relied on existing knowledge to finalize your research. Now you want to make your work available to the public. Here is how to properly include your academic research (journal article, thesis, book, ) in the Google Scholar search engine.

Create your Google Scholar profile

From this page, you can create your Google Scholar profile page. Include as much information as possible, such as a profile picture, your website, affiliation and areas of interest. I would also recommend you to make your profile public.

Once your profile looks good, we can move on to actually adding your academic writings. From here on, you have two options:

• You have only one or a few documents you want to submit, go for option 1
• You have many articles you want to add and are planning on writing even more in the future, go for option 2

Option 1 – Adding one by one

If you only want to include one document (let’s say, your master’s thesis), you can do so manually. Here are the steps:

• Go to this page to start adding a document manually.
• Choose the type of document (journal, conference, chapter, book, thesis, patent, court case or other).
• Fill in all the details about your article (title, author(s), publication date(s), volume, publisher, institution).

Click save and if you filled in everything correctly, you will see the message ‘Added article to your profile’. Congratulations!

Option 2 – Submit a website with all your work

In case you have an academic career and you have a list of work on your (academic or personal) website, option 2 is more suitable for you.

Google has guidelines to help you index your website that contains your academic work. Here are the steps you should follow to successfully include all of your work at once:

• Go to this page  and pick the type of website you are submitting. In my case, I choose ‘Personal publications’.
• Read and check the check-boxes that apply to you, such as ‘My inclusion request is for my personal publications’.
• Fill in the requested details, whereby the your webpage with academic articles should be filled in by ‘List of publications page’.
• Lastly, you are asked to include one or more article examples. So, paste the direct link to on or more of your PDFs there.

click submit and you are greeted with this message

Thanks for submitting your website to Google Scholar. Our crawl team is working hard to add new content as quickly as possible, and we appreciate your assistance. Please keep in mind that bibliographic data is extracted from your pages by automatic software. If you aren’t satisfied with the accuracy of your listings, please refer to our technical guidelines at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html for ways to provide more accurate bibliographic data. An email detailing your submission has been sent to [email protected] . If your content meets our guidelines, you can generally expect to find it included within the Google Scholar results within 4-6 weeks.

Be patient, because as the message says, it can take up to a month or more before your articles are indexed. You will also receive an e-mail from  [email protected] with the data you just submitted.

Follow your own profile

Here is a great tip: follow your own Google Scholar profile!

Go to your own profile and at the top right, choose ‘follow’. Enter your e-mail and create the alert. If Google adds a new article to your profile, or a new citation, you will receive an e-mail alert.

This is an excellent way to receive a heads up if another researcher or student has cited your work in their academic writings. Maybe you can even reach out to the author(s) and talk about their research; a great way to expand your network.

Join the conversation

17 Comments

What are good open alternatives or extensions for Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search?

Mate is it equivalent to journal publishings.

Thanks a lot Mr. Thomas. I am much benefited by your informative article. The way and simplicity gave me enourament to read all and actually helped me to solve my problem. God bless you.

I like to add my journal in indexing of google scholar

Thanks Thomas for the link to “Submit a website with all your work”, that was a great tip.

I am genuinely happy to read this webpage posts which carries lots of valuable information, thanks for providing such statistics.

RESPECTED SIR, HOW CAN I UPLOAD MY ARTICLE WHICH IS NOT PUBLISHED ANYWHERE TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR, AS I AM A PHD SCHOLAR, THERE IS NO PROVISION TO UPLOAD AND SAVE OPTION IN MY SCHOLAR ACCOUNT. I JUST OPENED AN ACCOUNT SIR. PLS GUIDE ME IN THIS REGARD. THANK YOU SIR

how to add pdf file to google scholars?

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Name Course Professor Institution City and State location The Date  

TABLE OF CONTENT 1. Introduction…………………………………………………..4 1.1 Background Information………………………………….4 1.2 Definition of Corporate Governance……………………4 1.3 Importance of Corporate Governance…………………..4 1.4 Corporate Governance Theories………………………….5 1.5 Corporate Governance Codes……………………………5 2. Corporate Governance Mechanism………………………….6 2.1 Corporate boards………………………………………….7 2.1.1 Corporate board Structure……………………………7 2.1.2 Role of corporate board……………………………..8 2.2 Institutional Investors……………………………………9 2.2.1 Role of Institutional Investors ……………………..9 2.3 Other Corporate Governance Mechanisms……………10 3. Case Studies…………………………………………………10 3.1 Enron…………………………………………………….10 3.1.1 Background………………………………………..10 3.1.2 Enron’s Failure of Corporate Governance………..11 3.2 Reckitt Benckiser………………………………………12 3.2.1 Background………………………………………..12 3.2.2 Failure of Corporate Governance…………………12 3.3 Satyam………………………………………………….13 3.3.1 Background………………………………………..13 3.3.2 Failure of Corporate Governance ………………..13 3.4 WorldCom……………………………………………..14 3.4.1 Background……………………………………….14 3.4.2 Failure of Corporate Governance…………………14

4 Recommendations…………………………………………15 5 Conclusion…………………………………………………17 6 References…………………………………………………18   Introduction 1.1 Background Many scholars, economists, and other professions consider 2007- 2009 global financial crisis as the worst financial crisis ever since the great depression of 1930. The period characterized by the collapse of many financial institutions, massive bailouts, the economic downturn and finally the great recession was primarily attributed to the failure of corporate governance. As much as this was a low point in corporate governance, it also showed its importance not only to individual firms but to the world economy as a whole (Tricker & Tricker 2015). Never before has the notion that corporate boards and institutional investors are the most important corporate governance mechanisms in the firms with important implications for the sustainable long-term success of the firm been so vividly seen. From time immemorial as humans, we have always learned from our mistakes and the 2007-2009 was an eye opener especially to corporate governance. Before I can explain further on the notion, it is important to learn the basic aspects of corporate governance. 1.2 Definition of Corporate Governance Corporate governance in simple terms refers to the set of rules, processes, and practice through which a company is controlled and directed with (Solomon 2007). It involves balancing the interests of the organization with the interests of other parties such as the government, investors, lenders, suppliers, the community etc. 1.3 Importance of Corporate Governance When executed properly, corporate governance can help a company avoid certain risks such as lawsuits, fraud, and misappropriation of funds. In addition to that, good corporate governance helps in boosting the organization’s brand and reputation to the media, investors, suppliers, customers and the society as the whole. Furthermore, cooperate governance protects the financial interests of the individuals involved with the company such as the shareholders and the employees as explained by (Vitez, 2017).

1.4 Theories of Corporate Governance Corporate governance can be defined in many ways but when it comes to analyzing it, we do it through a framework of different theories. One of those theories is the agency theory which looks at the shareholders as the principals and the executives that have been hired to run the business as their agents. Another theory is the stewardship theory which looks at the executive as the stewards of the shareholders with both parties sharing the same goals. In addition to that, we have the resource dependent theory which considers the board as to be in existence so as to provide resources to the management with the aim of achieving the overall objectives of the business. Stakeholder theory comes from the assumptions that it is not just the shareholders who have an interest in the company but other parties too such as suppliers, the government, creditors among others (Farrar 2008). This means that this parties too can be affected by the success or failure of the business. Other theories of cooperate governance include transaction cost theory, political theory, and ethical related theories. 1.5 Corporate Governance Codes Introduction The code of governance over the years have originated for various reasons or in response to various circumstances. The first major release was in 1992 by Sir Adrian Cadbury popularly referred to ‘Cadbury Code’ titled “the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance”. Following serious revisions over the years, the code is nowadays administered by the Financial Reporting Council. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) developed the first internationally influential codes back in 1999 following a business advisory committee that was led by Irra Milstein. Boards that govern companies are influenced by several documents which include but not limited to articles of incorporation, by-laws, corporate governance guidelines, committee charters, and codes of conduct. When it comes to the United States, various federals laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act, federal laws as well as federal security laws in addition to regulations, rules, and guidance from SEC are used. These documents are meant to be used for the purpose of best practices and flexible working standards to safeguard the various parties that have an interest in the organization. In short, they basically outline the interaction between the board and management outlining the structure and the behavior of the board. The codes are normally contributed to by various individuals including investors, accounting firms, regulators, banks, corporate governance interest organizations, academics, and stock exchanges, among others.

Corporate Governance Mechanism Policies, control, and guidelines are vital for an adequate corporate governance mechanisms. An effective corporate governance mechanism will consist of a number of various mechanisms. The first level consists of internal mechanisms which monitor the business from within and take corrective measures when the business stray away from its set objectives. They include reporting lines that are clearly defined, systems that measure performance and systems for the smooth operation of the business. The next level is the external mechanisms which are controlled by those outside the business and serve the objectives of outsiders such as the regulators, government, financial institutions, and trade unions among others. The objectives of the external mechanism include proper debt management and legal compliance by the company in question. The last level consists of an audit of the entity’s financial statements by an independent auditor who generally works to serve both the internal and external parties that are involved with an organization to ensure that their interests are guided and that the management is doing everything properly. They also act as a second opinion to back up what the management is saying. 2.1 Corporate Boards The board generally consist of groups of individuals elected or nominated by shareholders in the annual general meeting. The board of directors normally act as a bridge between the company and the shareholders -it decides as a fiduciary with the aim of protecting the latter’s interests. This is the norm with a Public company even though nowadays most non-profit making organizations and private companies also have a board. Their main mandate is to make policies for corporate management and also to make decisions on major issues that affect the company. 2.1.1 Corporate Board Structure The structure of the board of directors is mainly guided by the company’s bylaws which sets out the structure, number of members, how often they meet etc. The most important element is that it should be able to balance both the interests of the management and Shareholders. The duties are regulated by the statutory laws, federal statutory laws, listing standards, common law and shareholder activism and litigation. The membership of the board normally constitutes independent directors, senior company executives, non-independent directors such as former senior executives of the company among others. Nasdaq rules require the majority of the board members to be independent and in they constitute up to 75% or more of the boards in 93 of the top 100 US companies. Most boards consist of 8 to 15 members. There are no age and nationality restrictions although in recent years gender balance has been emphasized. 2.1.2 Roles of the Corporate Boards The board’s primary role as discussed earlier is the fiduciary duty to safeguard the finances and the legal requirements of the entity. They do this by ensuring that the entity in questions does all that is required of it by the law, and the funds are properly used. Another role of the board of directors is setting up the mission and vision of the organization. In addition to that, they ensure that the management adheres and work towards achieving them. Over sighting the activities of members of the organization such as executives is another role of the corporate board. The board ensures that the management adheres to rules and regulations and do their work as prescribed. Other roles of the board of directors come up in the annual meetings where-by, they announce the annual dividends, oversee the appointment of key executives and amend the by-laws where it is necessary (Dimopoulos & Wagner, 2016). Other roles of the corporate board include setting up the strategy for the company for long-term survival, short-term gains and future exploration of opportunities that are likely to arise. This might also include setting up the structure of the company to ensure efficiency. The board, however, does not take part in the day to day running of the organization and thus serve another role of delegating the duties to the management. The board should also monitor, control functions and set up compensation plans for the executives. Last but definitely not least, the board helps in acquiring resources for the organization while ensuring continuity. With great power comes great responsibilities. The board must always use their powers for the right reason and do what is required of them by the shareholders of the company. The board must always carry out whatever they do in the full interest of the company, and in case there is a conflict of interest then the interests of the company should always come first. They must also carry out their task with due care minding the interests of both the shareholders and that of the employees. Other responsibilities of the board include acting as the court of appeal in case there are disputes, accessing the performance of the firm and enhancing the organization’s overall public image and brand name. 2.2 Institutional Investors An institutional investor is a person, persons or organization that pools money or provides funds to purchase securities, other investment assets, property or originate loans. They include financial institutions such as banks, Insurance companies, pension and hedge firms, investment advisors, commercial trusts and mutual funds. For a firm to grow, it requires resources inform of money which is provided by these institutional investors who get profits and interests as compensation for their troubles in taking the risk. The returns should exceed the fees and expenses of the investments and is compared against treasury bills which are considered to be risk-free. 2.2.1 Roles and Responsibilities of Institutional investors The best thing about institutional investors is the fact that they have expertise and knowledge to monitor the health and progress of the business. With this knowledge, they can provide the best advice the organization and also control the tendency of the management to put their interests first as opposed to the interests of the company. This active monitoring helps reduce misappropriation of funds and other forms of fraud (Gillan & Starks 2002, pp. 275-305) The institutional investors can act as a source of stability in hard times as was the case in the coal crisis in India recently. By offering additional funds, the institutional investors increase their stake and say in the company thus can push for better corporate governance. Another aspect related to this is the fact the institutional investors have a louder voice compared to minority investors. Most of the time when minority shareholders raise their concerns on corporate governance, they will rarely get addressed or at times get thwarted by the minorities which are not the case with institutional investors. 2.3 Other Corporate Governance Mechanism Other parties that are involved in corporate governance include the shareholders themselves who have the biggest interests as the main contributors of capital, the employees who get their incomes and job security from the good governance of the company, the government which gets taxes from the organization and the society as a whole which benefits from job creation, income distribution, corporate social responsibility activities of the firm among other benefits. Case Studies 3.1 Enron 3.1.1 Background The story of Enron was not only the largest bankruptcy case at the time but also the biggest audit failure. This was cited by many as the biggest corporate governance failure especially on the part of corporate boards and institutional investors. Enron was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay who also triples up as the chairman and chief executive officer. This was after merging Houston Natural gas and Intermonth. Other key people involved with Enron included: Jeffrey Skiing who was the C.O.O, Andrew Fastow who was the CFO and Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche who was the once a vice chairman. From 1995 to 2000 Enron was in fact named America most innovative company by Fortune. In the mid-2000s at its peak, the shares of Enron were trading at $90.75 per share. By the end of November 2001, they were trading at less than $1 per share. This was when the shareholders filed a $40 billion lawsuit. Enron filed for bankruptcy on December second, 2001 with assets worth $63.4 billion making it the biggest bankruptcy scandal ever in American history at the time. At this stage, the shares were going at $0.26 per share. 3.1.2 Failure of Corporate Governance in Enron Lack of due care and skill from the board was one of the reasons why Enron failed. As submitted by S.Watkins, Kenneth Lay who was Enron’s chair, could not get what was being said to him in regards to the company having questionable accounting practices. This also showed lack of proper communication between the board and the executives. This was further elaborated by Jeffrey McMahon, the new Enron’s president who said it was virtually impossible to challenge the authorities at Enron. A culture of intimidation had also developed at the company with the likes of Ms. Watkins fearing to lose their jobs. The board literally failed in its role of directing. This showed some sort of conflict of interests where they were more than happy to receive high compensations without asking serious questions which would have led to a decrease in their personal bonuses. The management who carried out the day to running of the Enron misrepresented information by allocating Enron’s debts to its dubious partners. This also showed the lack of proper internal controls at Enron (Carberry & Zajac 2017, p.15134). The corporate investors also failed to properly supervise the company and advice accordingly. For example, according to an economist at Enron, it was important it was all mind games as it was important for the employees, investors, and analysts to believe that the stock will bounce back. Other corporate investors such as the two trustees of Enron’s 401(k) plan failed in their duties as they did not warn the plan participants despite a memo detailing the accounting malpractices. The institutional investors also had all the knowledge and expertise but failed to utilize them- they just sat back and believed whatever they were told. 3.2 Reckitt Benckiser 3.2.1 Background Reckitt Benckiser is a British multinational that produces consumer goods to do with hygien, health, and home products. The name comes from the merging of a United Kingdom company Reckitt & Coleman and Benckiser NV that was based in the Netherlands back in 1999. The most well-known products worldwide include Dettol and Strepsil. Reckitt Benckiser acquired Korean Oxy brand in 2001 which had been using polyhexamethathylene guanidine (PHMG) in a product since 1996. In 2011, PHMG was banned by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and prevention after a published report showed a link to lung damage and report. Several reports also came out supporting the Korean report, and at the height of this in 2016 a coalition of consumer groups came out for the total boycott of Reckitt Benckiser products after it had been linked to more than 500 deaths from a BBC report. 3.2.1 Failure of Corporate Governance Mechanism in Reckitt Benckiser In the case of corporate governance, the management and directors fail as a whole in doing their duty of due care and skill when acquiring the Korean Oxy brand. They had a duty to investigate and know what is in the product. They put the company’s financial interests before the safety of the consumers. In addition to that, several attempts were made by the board and management to suppress investigations instead of taking corrective measures. Even though this was mostly a failure by the management and board, institutional investors also had the power to ask questions. Despite the various reports, they were silent till there was outrage in the mass media. 3.3 Satyam 3.3.1 Background Satyam was India’s fourth largest computer service company in India which has a population of over 1 billion. It was even listed on New York Stock exchange in 2001 with revenues exceeding $1 billion. The founder, M. Raju Ramalinga who was also the chair was a highly regarded person in the business often gracing all the major corporate events. In 2008 Satyam won the coveted prize of the Golden Peacock Award for compliance issues and Risk Management in corporate governance. In 2009, M. Raju confessed that the company’s accounts had been falsified by a massive $1.47 billion (Bhasin 2005). In the same year, Satyam stock was banned from trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and the Golden Peacock Award stripped off. Mr. Raju was later convicted together with other senior members. 3.3.2 Failure of Corporate Governance Mechanisms The board at Satyam failed in their primary duty of due care and monitoring the activity of the business as they did not notice the discrepancy. This was so evident that the first order was to appoint a temporary board. The board also put their interests first at the expense of the company for financial gains as confessed by their chairman. Despite the amount that falsified being that large, the auditors who were Price Water House Coopers failed in their auditing duties as they did not report anything amiss despite having all the expertise and experience. They were even fined $6 million by the US stock exchange for not following the code of conduct and auditing standards in when offering their services to Satyam. Institutional investors also failed to raise questions or properly examine the financial statements. Furthermore, with their expertise, they should have pushed for compliance with the corporate code of governance. 3.4 Worldcom 3.4.1 Background Before filing for bankruptcy protection in 2002, WorldCom was the second largest long distance phone company in the United States. With assets totaling over $104 billion, $30 billion in revenues and over 60,000 employees WorldCom filed for bankruptcy protection on July 1, 2002. The company later wrote down more than 75% of the total assets with over 17,000 of the workers losing their jobs. Over the period between 1999-2002, WorldCom had deliberately overstated their income before tax by over $7 billion which was the main reason behind the falling from grace to grass. It is currently known as Verizon business or Verizon enterprise solution after being acquired by Verizon Communications and is slowly rebuilding and being integrated into the parent company. 3.4.2 Failure of corporate Mechanism in WorldCom The biggest failure of WorldCom was the fact that the board had failed in its structuring role. Over the years, it had acquired a lot of companies with even one accountant confessing that they would get calls from people they did not even know existed. The departments were also not even properly structured for efficient working and were very decentralized. For example, the finance department was in Mississippi; the network operations were in Texas, the human resource in Florida and the legal department in Washington DC. This provided a challenge of communication as each department developed their ways of doing things. Apart from that, the difference in management style and the culture that was developed of not questioning seniors was a discouragement for employees who wanted to correct any issues that arose. In fact, there was a deliberate attempt by the management to hide vital financial issues as explained by Buddy Yates, the director of general accounting who was told he would be thrown outside the window in case he had shown the numbers to the auditors by Gene Morse, a senior manager. The employees also put their self-interests above the interest of the company as loyal employees were often compensated above the company’s approved salaries and bonus packages by Ebbers and Sullivan. The biggest failure was the board however as they failed terribly in all their roles and responsibilities including due care, supervision, bridging the gap between management and shareholder among others. In the case of institutional investors, they also failed terribly. No one raised a question on the structure of the firm or why the firm was highly decentralized. The increase in the salaries and compensation for the ‘loyal’ employees in the finance and accounting department should also have raised questions. Institutional investors should have also used their expertise to confirm the information that was being provided to them. Recommendations on Improving the Quality Of Corporate Governance Corporates Boards Should Meet Regularly: The corporates boards do not take part in the day to day running of the business, but they have a supervisory role. To carry out the tasks effectively, they need to meet more often (Christensen et al 2015, pp.133-164) Division of Responsibilities: The duties and responsibilities of a firm should be properly defined and allocated within an organization. This will help in reducing conflicts and also knowing who is liable and for what. This will also help enhance effective communication within an organization. Stronger Internal Controls: Controls in an organization should start from within for effective corporate governance. The controls include the supervision of seniors, physical controls, controls among others. Transparency: Corporate governance is all about transparency. Transparency does not mean revealing the companies but being honest in its activities. In case there is a loss it should be stated and corrective measures to correct it taken, Proper succession planning: One of the best attributes is that its life is not limited to that of the owners or directors. A proper succession plan should, therefore, be set in place to ensure that the values of the company that encourages proper corporate governance are passed from one generation to the other within the company Proper training of directors: The directors of the company are the eyes of the society and shareholders in the business. They need to be properly trained to carry out their tasks effectively as is required of them. Another option is to select a board of directors that is highly qualified in the different fields that the business is engaged in. Independent members increase: Any organization that is interested in improving its corporate governance should try as much as possible to increase the list of independent parties in its running. The independent parties with no direct relation can view the business from a better neutral point (Klapper & Love 2002, pp.703-728) Conclusion It is crystal clear from the discussions above that the corporate governance mechanisms such as corporate boards and institutional boards are the backbone for the survival of any company. From the cases discussed above, we can see the consequences of bad corporate governance and the fact that it does not matter how big the company is. In addition to that, there is a failure the many bodies that are meant to supervise corporate governance. Corporate governance board needs to do more than just take the words of corporations. It is an understatement to say that corporate governance should be a priority, it should actually be a prerequisite (Lebedeva et al 2016). 

References Bhasin, M.L., 2015. Corporate accounting fraud: A case study of Satyam Computers Limited. Carberry, E. and Zajac, E., 2017, January. How US Corporations Changed Executive Compensation after Enron: Substance and Symbol. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 15134). Academy of Management Christensen, J., Kent, P., Routledge, J. and Stewart, J., 2015. Do corporate governance recommendations improve the performance and accountability of small listed companies?. Accounting & Finance, 55(1), pp.133-164. Dimopoulos, T. and Wagner, H.F., 2016. Corporate Governance and CEO Turnover Decisions. Farrar, J., 2008. Corporate governance: theories, principles and practice. Oxford University Press Gillan, S.L. and Starks, L.T., 2000. Corporate governance proposals and shareholder activism: The role of institutional investors. Journal of financial Economics, 57(2), pp.275-305. Ilya, P., 2015. inc. [Online] Available at: http://www.inc.com/ilya-pozin/14-highly-effective-ways-to-motivate-employees.html [Accessed 27 January 2018].

Klapper, L.F. and Love, I., 2004. Corporate governance, investor protection, and performance in emerging markets. Journal of corporate Finance, 10(5), pp.703-728. Lebedeva, T.E., Akhmetshin, E.M., Dzagoyeva, M.R., Kobersy, I.S. and Ikoev, S.K., 2016. Corporate governance issues and control in conditions of unstable capital risk. International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 6(1S). Solomon, J., 2007. Corporate governance and accountability. John Wiley & Sons. Tricker, R.B. and Tricker, R.I., 2015. Corporate governance: Principles, policies, and practices. Oxford University Press, USA. Vitez, O., 2017. Bizfluent. [Online] Available at: https://bizfluent.com/facts-6884459-importance-corporate governance.html [Accessed 21 February 2018].

Hi, we have the scientific journal: https://journal.scsa.ge/

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Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

• View Article
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• 3. Teaching VUC for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations. n.d. Available from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/making-better-powerpoint-presentations/#baddeley .
• 8. Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. Dyslexia friendly style guide. nd. Available from: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide .
• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

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Most PhD's will have a presentation component during the interview process, as well as presenting their work at conferences. This article will provide guidance on how to develop relevant content and effectively deliver it to your audience.

Most organizations list communication skills as one of their most critical issues…and presentation skills are a large component of communications. Presentation skills are crucial to almost every aspect of academic/business life, from meetings, interviews and conferences to trade shows and job fairs. Often times, leadership and presentation skills go hand in hand. NACE Survey 2016 - Ability to communicate verbally (internally and externally) ranked 4.63/5.0 and was the #1 skill employers want. The information provided in this article is designed to provide tips and strategies for delivering an effective presentation, and one that aligns the speaker with the audience.

What type of speaker are you?

Facts and fears of public speaking.

Your blueprint for delivery.

Avoider —You do everything possible to escape from having to get in front of an audience.

Resister —You may have to speak, but you never encourage it.

Accepter —You’ll give presentations but don’t seek those opportunities. Sometimes you feel good about a presentation you gave.

Seeker —Looks for opportunities to speak. Finds the anxiety a stimulant that fuels enthusiasm during a presentation.

Public speaking can create anxiety and fear in many people. Dale Carnegie has a free e-book that provides tips and advice on how to minimize these fears www.dalecarnegie.com/Free-eBook

People are caught between their fear and the fact that many employers expect them to demonstrate good verbal communication skills.

Most interviews by PhD’s have a presentation component.

Academic interviews always have a presentation component.

If your job doesn’t demand presentation skills, odds are that you’ll need them in your next job

Develop your blueprint for delivery:

Information by itself can be boring, unless it's unique or unusual. Conveying it through stories, gestures and analogies make it interesting. A large portion of the impact of communications rests on how you look and sound, not only on what you say. Having good presentation skills allows you to make the most out of your first impression, especially at conferences and job interviews. As you plan your presentation put yourself in the shoes of the audience.

Values …What is important to them?

Needs …What information do they want?

Constraints …Understand their level of knowledge on the subject and target them appropriately.

Demographics …Size of audience and location may influence the presentation. For example, a large auditorium may be more formal and less personal than a presentation to your team or lab mates in a less formal setting.

Structure—Introduction, Content and Conclusion

Body Language and Movement

Verbal Delivery

Introduction

Build rapport with audience (easier in a smaller less formal setting).

State preference for questions—during or after?

Set stage: provide agenda, objective and intended outcomes

Introduce yourself providing your name, role and function. Let the audience know the agenda, your objectives and set their expectations. Give them a reason to listen and make an explicit benefit statement, essentially what's in it for them. Finally, let them know how you will accomplish your objective by setting the agenda and providing an outline of what will be covered.

Deliver your message logically and structured.

Use appropriate anecdotes and examples.

Illustrate and emphasize key points by using color schemes or animations.

Establish credibility, possibly citing references or publications.

Structure your presentation to maximize delivery. Deliver the main idea and communicate to the audience what your intended outcome will be. Transition well through the subject matter and move through your presentation by using phrases such as; ‘now we will review…’ or ‘if there are no more questions, we will now move onto…’ Be flexible and on course. If needed, use examples not in the presentation to emphasize a point, but don’t get side tracked. Stay on course by using phrases such as ‘let's get back to…’ Occasionally, reiterate the benefits of the content and the main idea of your presentation.

Restate the main objective and key supporting points

For Q&A: ‘Who wants more details?’ (Not, ‘any questions?’)

Prompting for questions: ‘A question I often hear is…’

Summarize the main elements of your presentation as they relate to the original objective. If applicable, highlight a key point or crucial element for the audience to take away. Signal the end is near…‘to wrap up’ or ‘to sum up’. Clearly articulate the next steps, actions or practical recommendations. Thank the audience and solicit final questions.

Your non-verbal communications are key elements of your presentation. They are composed of open body posture, eye contact, facial expressions, hand gestures, posture and space between you and the audience.

Stand firmly and move deliberately. Do not sway or shift.

Move at appropriate times during presentation (e.g. move during transitions or to emphasize a point).

Stand where you can see everyone and do not block the visuals/screen.

Decide on a resting position for hands (should feel and look comfortable).

Gestures should be natural and follow what you are saying.

Hand movement can emphasize your point.

Make gestures strong and crisp…ok to use both arms/hands.

Keep hands away from face.

When pointing to the screen, do so deliberately. Do not wave and face the audience to speak

Look at audience's faces, not above their heads.

If an interview or business meeting…look at the decision makers as well as everyone else.

Look at faces for 3–5 seconds and then move on to the next person.

Do not look away from the audience for more than 10 seconds.

Looking at a person keeps them engaged.

Looking at their faces tells you how your delivery and topic is being received by the audience. The audience's body language may show interest, acceptance, openness, boredom, hostility, disapproval and neutrality. Read the audience and adjust where and if appropriate to keep them engaged. For example, if they seem bored inject an interesting anecdote or story to trigger more interest. If they appear to disapprove, ask for questions or comments to better understand how you might adjust your delivery and content if applicable.

Use active rather than passive verbs.

Avoid technical terms, unless you know the audience is familiar with them.

Always use your own words and phrases.

Cut out jargon/slang words.

Look at your audience and use vocal techniques to catch their attention. Consider changing your pace or volume, use a longer than normal pause between key points, and change the pitch or inflection of your voice if needed. Consider taking a drink of water to force yourself to pause or slowdown. View the audience as a group of individual people, so address them as if they were a single person.

Tips for reducing anxiety

If you experience nervousness before your presentation, as most people do, consider the following.

Be Organized —Knowing that your presentation and thoughts are well organized will give you confidence.

Visualize —Imagine delivering your presentation with enthusiasm and leaving the room knowing that you did a good job.

Practice —All successful speakers rehearse their presentations. Either do it alone, with your team, or video tape yourself and review your performance after. Another tip is to make contact before your talk. If possible, speak with the audience before your presentation begins; however, not always possible with a large audience. Walk up to them and thank them in advance for inviting you to speak today.

Movement —Speakers who stand in one spot may experience tension. In order to relax, move in a purposeful manner and use upper body gestures to make points.

Eye Contact —Make your presentation a one-on-one conversation. Build rapport by making it personal and personable. Use words such as ‘ we ’ , ‘ our ’, ‘ us ’ . Eye contact helps you relax because you become less isolated from the audience.

Personal appearance

Clothes should fit well, not too tight. Consider wearing more professional business-like attire. Find two to three colors that work well for you. Conservative colors, such as black, blue, gray and brown, seem to be the safest bet when presenting or meeting someone for the first time in a professional setting. Depending upon the audience, a sport coat and well-matched dress slacks are fine. Generally, try to avoid bright reds, oranges and whites, since these tend to draw attention away from your face. Avoid jewelry that sparkles, dangles or makes noise. Use subtle accessories to compliment your outfit.

Other resources: www.toastmasters.org https://www.skillsyouneed.com/present/presentation-tips.html

https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/evaluation/documents/effective-presentations-a-toolkit-for-engaging-an-audience

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How to Add Conference Paper in Google Scholar?

Are you a researcher looking to increase the visibility of your conference paper? If so, you might be wondering, “How to add a conference paper in Google Scholar?” Well, you’re in luck!

To add a conference paper to Google Scholar, you’ll need to create a Google Scholar profile, verify your authorship, and upload the paper to your profile.

In this blog post, we will guide you through the simple steps to ensure your conference paper is indexed and discoverable on Google Scholar. So, let’s dive in and learn how to add your conference paper to Google Scholar effectively!

Importance Of Adding Your Conference Paper To Google Scholar

Google Scholar indexes scholarly literature across a wide range of disciplines. As a researcher, adding your conference paper to Google Scholar can significantly enhance the visibility and impact of your work . This article highlights the importance of adding your conference paper to Google Scholar, discussing three key reasons.

Increased Discoverability

Adding your conference paper to Google Scholar increases its discoverability among researchers and scholars worldwide. Academics and professionals extensively use Google Scholar to search for relevant papers in their field of interest.

Indexing your paper on Google Scholar makes it more accessible to the scholarly community, leading to potential citations, collaborations, and wider dissemination of your research findings.

Enhanced Reputation and Visibility

Google Scholar provides a platform to showcase your research achievements and establish your academic reputation. When your conference paper appears on Google Scholar, it adds credibility to your work, as the platform is known for its rigorous indexing process.

Moreover, Google Scholar calculates citation metrics, such as the h-index to measure your scholarly impact. This increased visibility and reputation can attract opportunities for grants, collaborations, and invitations to present at future conferences.

Long-Term Preservation and Impact

Google Scholar ensures the long-term preservation and accessibility of your conference paper. The platform stores and indexes papers from various sources, including conference proceedings, allowing future researchers to access and cite your work even after the conference has ended.

This archival feature guarantees that your research continues to make an impact and contributes to the scholarly knowledge base. Additionally, Google Scholar provides usage statistics for your paper, allowing you to track the impact and reach of your research over time.

Adding your paper to Google Scholar can enhance its discoverability and improve its chances of being cited by other researchers. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to add your conference paper to Google Scholar.

Create a Google Scholar Profile

First, create a Google Scholar profile by signing in to your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, create one for free. Go to scholar.google.com and click the “My Profile” icon in the top-right corner.

Click on the “Add” button

Once you’re on your Google Scholar profile, click on the “Add” button located in the top-left corner. A drop-down menu will appear with different options.

Select “Add articles”

From the drop-down menu, select “Add articles” to add your conference paper. This option allows you to enter the details of your paper manually.

Fill in the paper details

A form will appear where you can provide the necessary details of your conference paper, such as title, authors, abstract, publication date, and venue. Ensure that the information is accurate and complete.

Upload the full-text PDF

After filling in the paper details, you have the option to upload the full-text PDF of your conference paper. Make sure you have the copyright permissions to upload the paper.

Save and review

Once you have entered all the required information and uploaded the PDF, click the “Save” button to add your conference paper to Google Scholar. Review the details to ensure accuracy.

Verify indexing

Google Scholar will automatically index your paper, but it may take some time to appear in search results. You can search for your paper by title or author name to check if it has been successfully indexed.

What Information Should You Include In Your Conference Paper For Optimal Visibility On Google Scholar?

For optimal visibility and impact, it is crucial to structure conference papers effectively to maximize their discoverability on Google Scholar. Here we’ve provided guidance on key information to include in your conference paper for optimal visibility on Google Scholar.

Title and Abstract

Craft a concise and informative title that accurately reflects the paper’s content and uses relevant keywords. The abstract should provide a brief overview of the paper, highlighting the research problem, methodology, key findings, and contributions. Ensure the abstract is well-written and engaging , as it plays a vital role in attracting readers and improving visibility.

Include a carefully selected set of keywords throughout your paper, representing the main themes, concepts, and methodologies. Integrate these keywords seamlessly into the introduction, headings, subheadings, and conclusion to enhance search engine optimization (SEO) and facilitate discovery on Google Scholar.

Introduction and Objectives

The introduction should clearly state the research problem, provide a concise literature review, and outline the paper’s objectives and research questions. Clearly articulate the significance and novelty of the research to capture readers’ interest and increase the likelihood of citation and visibility.

Methodology and Results

Describe your research methodology sufficiently, allowing readers to replicate or build upon your work. Clearly present and interpret your results, incorporating visual aids like tables, figures, and graphs. Comprehensive and well-presented methodology and results sections contribute to the credibility and impact of your paper, improving visibility.

Conclusion and Implications

Summarize the main findings and contributions of your research in the conclusion. Discuss the implications of your work and suggest potential avenues for future research. Including a clear and compelling conclusion enhances your paper’s overall visibility and impact on Google Scholar.

Can You Add Multiple Conference Papers To Your Google Scholar Profile?

Yes, you can add multiple conference papers to your Google Scholar profile. Simply go to your profile settings and click the option to add papers. From there, you can enter the relevant details for each conference paper, such as the title, authors, abstract, and publication information.

Google Scholar allows you to showcase your research work from various conferences and make it easily discoverable to other researchers in your field. Updating your profile with conference papers helps establish your academic credentials and increases the visibility of your research contributions.

Key Steps to Present and Publish a Conference Paper

Publishing and presenting a conference paper is an essential part of academic research. It allows researchers to share their findings with a wider audience and receive peer feedback. Here are key steps to consider when preparing for a conference paper presentation and publication.

• Select the Right Conference: Choose a conference that aligns with your research area and objectives. Look for conferences with a strong reputation and attract experts in your field.
• Craft a Compelling Abstract: Write a concise and engaging abstract highlighting the significance of your research, methodology, key results, and implications. It should grab the attention of the conference organizers and potential attendees.
• Prepare an Effective Presentation: Create a visually appealing and well-structured presentation that effectively conveys your research. Use clear visuals, such as graphs and charts, to support your findings. Practice your presentation to ensure a confident and coherent delivery.
• Address Reviewers’ Comments: If your paper goes through a review process, carefully address the comments and suggestions provided by the reviewers. Revise your paper accordingly, strengthening any weaknesses or addressing any concerns raised.
• Format Your Paper Correctly: Adhere to the conference’s formatting guidelines when preparing the final version of your paper. Ensure the content is well-organized, properly referenced, and follows the specified citation style.
• Seek Permission for Publication: If your paper has not been previously published, ensure that you have the necessary permissions from co-authors and funding agencies to submit the paper for publication . Familiarize yourself with any copyright policies of the conference and the publication venue.
• Follow Publication Guidelines: When submitting your conference paper for publication, carefully follow the guidelines provided by the conference or journal. Pay attention to formatting, citation style, and any additional supplementary materials or author biographies requirements.

Common Mistakes To Avoid When Adding A Conference Paper To Google Scholar

There are several common mistakes that researchers should avoid to ensure the accuracy and credibility of their publication. Here, we will discuss some key mistakes to steer clear of when adding a conference paper to Google Scholar.

• Incomplete or Inaccurate Metadata: Ensure that all metadata fields, such as title, authors, abstract, and keywords, are accurately filled out. Incomplete or inaccurate information can lead to indexing issues and make it difficult for others to find your paper.
• Missing Full Text or Incorrect Link: Provide a direct link to the full text of your conference paper. Uploading the wrong document or failing to include the full text can result in researchers disregarding or overlooking your paper.
• Neglecting to Cite Relevant Works: Be thorough when citing related works in your conference paper. Neglecting to cite relevant studies can diminish the credibility of your research and hinder its discoverability. Provide accurate references to relevant literature to establish the context and significance of your work.
• Not Verifying the Quality of the Conference: Before adding your paper to Google Scholar, ensure that the conference where it was presented is reputable and has a rigorous review process . Including papers from questionable or predatory conferences can harm your academic reputation.
• Ignoring Updates and Corrections: Periodically check and update your conference paper’s information on Google Scholar. Correct any errors, update the metadata if necessary, and provide new versions of the paper if available. Ignoring updates may lead to outdated or incorrect information associated with your research.

The Downside of Downgrading: What to Do When Your Conference Paper Gets Rejected

Having your conference paper rejected can be disheartening, but it’s not the end. Here we explore the downsides of rejection and guide what you can do to make the most of the situation.

• Understand the reasons: Analyzing the reasons behind the rejection can help you identify areas for improvement and enhance your future submissions.
• Seek feedback: Reach out to the reviewers or conference organizers to request feedback on your paper. Their insights can be invaluable in refining your work.
• Revise and resubmit: Consider revising your paper based on the feedback received and resubmitting it to a different conference or journal . Use this opportunity to strengthen your research.
• Explore alternative publication options: If conference rejection persists, explore other avenues such as workshops, poster presentations, or specialized journals to showcase your work and gain recognition.
• Learn from the experience: View rejection as an opportunity for growth. Reflect on your research, writing, and presentation skills, and use the experience to improve future submissions.

Final Notes

Adding your conference paper to Google Scholar is crucial in maximizing its visibility and impact. By following the simple steps outlined in this blog, you can ensure that your research receives the recognition it deserves.

Remember to provide accurate and complete information, including the title, authors, abstract, and keywords. Additionally, ensure your paper is peer-reviewed and meets Google Scholar’s quality standards.

Doing so increases the chances of your work being discovered by fellow researchers, leading to potential collaborations and citations. So, make your mark in the academic community by effectively adding your conference paper to Google Scholar.

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Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding

Neural networks, in particular recurrent neural networks (RNNs), are now at the core of the leading approaches to language understanding tasks such as language modeling , machine translation and question answering . In “ Attention Is All You Need ”, we introduce the Transformer, a novel neural network architecture based on a self-attention mechanism that we believe to be particularly well suited for language understanding.

In our paper, we show that the Transformer outperforms both recurrent and convolutional models on academic English to German and English to French translation benchmarks. On top of higher translation quality, the Transformer requires less computation to train and is a much better fit for modern machine learning hardware, speeding up training by up to an order of magnitude.

Accuracy and Efficiency in Language Understanding

Neural networks usually process language by generating fixed- or variable-length vector-space representations. After starting with representations of individual words or even pieces of words, they aggregate information from surrounding words to determine the meaning of a given bit of language in context. For example, deciding on the most likely meaning and appropriate representation of the word “bank” in the sentence “I arrived at the bank after crossing the…” requires knowing if the sentence ends in “... road.” or “... river.”

RNNs have in recent years become the typical network architecture for translation, processing language sequentially in a left-to-right or right-to-left fashion. Reading one word at a time, this forces RNNs to perform multiple steps to make decisions that depend on words far away from each other. Processing the example above, an RNN could only determine that “bank” is likely to refer to the bank of a river after reading each word between “bank” and “river” step by step. Prior research has shown that, roughly speaking, the more such steps decisions require, the harder it is for a recurrent network to learn how to make those decisions.

The sequential nature of RNNs also makes it more difficult to fully take advantage of modern fast computing devices such as TPUs and GPUs, which excel at parallel and not sequential processing. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are much less sequential than RNNs, but in CNN architectures like ByteNet or ConvS2S the number of steps required to combine information from distant parts of the input still grows with increasing distance.

The Transformer

In contrast, the Transformer only performs a small, constant number of steps (chosen empirically). In each step, it applies a self-attention mechanism which directly models relationships between all words in a sentence, regardless of their respective position. In the earlier example “I arrived at the bank after crossing the river”, to determine that the word “bank” refers to the shore of a river and not a financial institution, the Transformer can learn to immediately attend to the word “river” and make this decision in a single step. In fact, in our English-French translation model we observe exactly this behavior.

More specifically, to compute the next representation for a given word - “bank” for example - the Transformer compares it to every other word in the sentence. The result of these comparisons is an attention score for every other word in the sentence. These attention scores determine how much each of the other words should contribute to the next representation of “bank”. In the example, the disambiguating “river” could receive a high attention score when computing a new representation for “bank”. The attention scores are then used as weights for a weighted average of all words’ representations which is fed into a fully-connected network to generate a new representation for “bank”, reflecting that the sentence is talking about a river bank.

The animation below illustrates how we apply the Transformer to machine translation. Neural networks for machine translation typically contain an encoder reading the input sentence and generating a representation of it. A decoder then generates the output sentence word by word while consulting the representation generated by the encoder. The Transformer starts by generating initial representations, or embeddings, for each word. These are represented by the unfilled circles. Then, using self-attention, it aggregates information from all of the other words, generating a new representation per word informed by the entire context, represented by the filled balls. This step is then repeated multiple times in parallel for all words, successively generating new representations.

The decoder operates similarly, but generates one word at a time, from left to right. It attends not only to the other previously generated words, but also to the final representations generated by the encoder.

Flow of Information

Beyond computational performance and higher accuracy, another intriguing aspect of the Transformer is that we can visualize what other parts of a sentence the network attends to when processing or translating a given word, thus gaining insights into how information travels through the network.

To illustrate this, we chose an example involving a phenomenon that is notoriously challenging for machine translation systems: coreference resolution. Consider the following sentences and their French translations:

It is obvious to most that in the first sentence pair “it” refers to the animal, and in the second to the street. When translating these sentences to French or German, the translation for “it” depends on the gender of the noun it refers to - and in French “animal” and “street” have different genders. In contrast to the current Google Translate model, the Transformer translates both of these sentences to French correctly. Visualizing what words the encoder attended to when computing the final representation for the word “it” sheds some light on how the network made the decision. In one of its steps, the Transformer clearly identified the two nouns “it” could refer to and the respective amount of attention reflects its choice in the different contexts.

Given this insight, it might not be that surprising that the Transformer also performs very well on the classic language analysis task of syntactic constituency parsing, a task the natural language processing community has attacked with highly specialized systems for decades.

In fact, with little adaptation, the same network we used for English to German translation outperformed all but one of the previously proposed approaches to constituency parsing.

We are very excited about the future potential of the Transformer and have already started applying it to other problems involving not only natural language but also very different inputs and outputs, such as images and video. Our ongoing experiments are accelerated immensely by the Tensor2Tensor library , which we recently open sourced. In fact, after downloading the library you can train your own Transformer networks for translation and parsing by invoking just a few commands . We hope you’ll give it a try, and look forward to seeing what the community can do with the Transformer.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted by Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin. Additional thanks go to David Chenell for creating the animation above.

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• Searching for an Individual Author in Google Scholar

Publication Tracking : Searching for an Individual Author in Google Scholar

• Getting Started
• Searching for an Individual Author in PubMed
• Searching for a Group of Authors in PubMed
• Searching for an Institution or Department in PubMed
• Searching for an Individual Author in Scopus
• Searching for a Group of Authors in Scopus
• Searching for an Affiliation in Scopus
• Searching for a Group of Authors in Google Scholar
• Searching for an Affiliation in Google Scholar
• Exporting Search Results

This page gives tips on how to search for an individual author in Google Scholar. Click here to access this information as a downloadable PDF.

Click here to access a PDF containing search templates and examples of searching for an individual author in Google Scholar.

Constructing Your Search

1. construct a broad search strategy.

You can begin by using a basic keyword search using the broadest and least limiting search terms to ensure you do not inadvertently exclude relevant publications.

To do this, start with your most basic search of last name and first initial. So, for example, if you wanted to search for publications by a Dr. John E. Doe, your initial search would look like this:

“J Doe”

Make sure to include the quotation marks. With this search, you will be retrieving publications that mention the last name of Doe, and a first initial of J. As a result, you will retrieve most of the relevant results for the author, but many irrelevant results as well (e.g. authors whose names are John P. Doe, Jason Doe, or Janet Doe, etc., or publications that mention J Doe but are not authored by them).

2. Limit Your Search Using the Author Field

You can search within the author field by either using Google Scholar’s Advanced Search or using the author field tag. The Advanced Search is effective when you are looking for a single author (with no name variations). The author field tag is best for searching multiple author names (including name variations).

A. Advanced Search

Google Scholar has an Advanced Search option. This function is particularly useful if you are only looking for a single author name. To access this function, click the three bars on the upper left-hand side of the screen.

This will cause a dropdown to appear. From there, click “Advanced Search.”

This will take you to Google Scholar’s Advanced Search. From here, you can use a variety of keyword options, and search by author, publication name, and/or date range. When searching for an author, make sure to put quotation marks around the author’s name.

B. Author Field Tag

An alternative way to search for an author is to use the author: field tag.

So, for example, if you wanted to search for John Doe, you would enter this into the Google Scholar search bar:

author:“J Doe”

3. Limit by Author’s Middle Initial

If you want to narrow your search, you can limit it by including the author's middle initial. However, you will want to correct for name ambiguity in your search, to ensure you will not miss relevant results. For example, the author, John E. Doe, may write their name in different ways in their publications (e.g. sometimes they may be referred to as J Doe, without a middle initial, or as J E Doe in a publication record). To correct for this, you will want to include name variations in your search and combine them using OR (or, in Google Scholar, the | symbol), just like in the strategy used below:

author:“JE Doe”|author:“J Doe”

This will retrieve publications that have the author listed as JE Doe or as J Doe. “|” works the same as a Boolean OR would, in that it will be retrieving publications with JE Doe in the author field, publications with J Doe in the author field, or publications with both JE Doe and J Doe in the author field.

4. Search by Author’s ORCID ID

ORCID IDs are like a social security number for researchers. If consistently included in publications and updated by the researcher, they can solve the issue of name ambiguity when searching for publications.

If the author you are searching for happens to have an ORCID ID, you can include it in your search. To do this, you will add the ORCID ID, excluding the dashes (-), using |, just like you would add an alternative name for the author, like so:

author:“JE Doe”|author:“J Doe”|0000000307994776

5. Limit by Affiliation Keyword

You can also limit your results by entering the author’s affiliation as a keyword. So, for example, if John Doe was from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you could enter the affiliation like so:

author:“JE Doe”|author:“J Doe” wisconsin

Google Scholar automatically inserts the Boolean AND between the words in your search. Just like if you were to use AND, this search would retrieve results that have either JE Doe and Wisconsin, or J Doe and Wisconsin in the publication.

6. Limit by Date

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• Published: 25 August 2021

Effect of different visual presentations on the comprehension of prognostic information: a systematic review

• Eman Abukmail 1 ,
• Mina Bakhit 1 ,
• Chris Del Mar 1 &
• Tammy Hoffmann 1  

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making volume  21 , Article number:  249 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Understanding prognostic information can help patients know what may happen to their health over time and make informed decisions. However, communicating prognostic information well can be challenging.

To conduct a systematic review to identify and synthesize research that has evaluated visual presentations that communicate quantitative prognostic information to patients or the public.

Data sources

MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO , ERIC and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (from inception to December 2020), and forward and backward citation search.

Study selection

Two authors independently screened search results and assessed eligibility. To be eligible, studies required a quantitative design and comparison of at least one visual presentation with another presentation of quantitative prognostic information. The primary outcome was comprehension of the presented information. Secondary outcomes were preferences for or satisfaction with the presentations viewed, and behavioral intentions.

Data extraction

Two authors independently assessed risk of bias and extracted data.

Data synthesis

Eleven studies (all randomized trials) were identified. We grouped studies according to the presentation type evaluated. Bar graph versus pictograph (3 studies): no difference in comprehension between the groups. Survival vs mortality curves (2 studies): no difference in one study; higher comprehension in survival curve group in another study. Tabular format versus pictograph (4 studies): 2 studies reported similar comprehension between groups; 2 found higher comprehension in pictograph groups. Tabular versus free text (3 studies): 2 studies found no difference between groups; 1 found higher comprehension in a tabular group.

Limitations

Heterogeneity in the visual presentations and outcome measures, precluding meta-analysis.

Conclusions

No visual presentation appears to be consistently superior to communicate quantitative prognostic information.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

Shared decision making is a bidirectional communication process in which clinicians and patients collaborate on making a health decision and discuss the available options (based on the best available evidence), the benefits and harms of each option, and the patient’s values, preferences, and circumstances [ 1 , 2 ]. As part of making decisions about the prevention or management of a health condition, patients need to know about more than just treatment options; they also need to know about the prognosis of the condition, with and without treatment.

Communication of prognostic information is essential as it helps patients to know what may happen to their health over time, to make appropriate preparations, and to make informed decisions about whether to intervene and if so, how. If prognostic information is not communicated adequately, patients may have inaccurate expectations about the likely course of their illness [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Poor communication of prognostic information can also make patients anxious, confused, and damage the relationship between clinician and patient [ 6 , 7 ].

Prognosis communication can be complex and challenging for clinicians and patients. Clinicians sometimes try to avoid or delay this kind of communication, while patients often wait for their clinicians to initiate the process [ 8 ]. As with the communication of treatment information, a contributor to the challenge of communicating prognostic information well is the difficulty that clinicians and patients can have understanding relevant quantitative information [ 9 , 10 , 11 ].

To facilitate discussion about prognosis, clinicians may use visual means (such as a graph) to present the quantitative information. Although there is a large body of synthesized evidence on how to communicate the quantitative benefits and harms of treatments, we are unaware of any synthesis about the various visual presentations that can be used to communicate quantitative prognostic information.

The protocol of this systematic review is registered at (CRD42020192564) and can be found in the Open Science Framework osf.io/ze26g.

This systematic review aimed to identify and synthesize research that has evaluated visual presentations that communicate quantitative prognostic information to patients or the public.

Information sources

We searched for studies in six databases: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), each from date of inception till December 2020. We used a tailored search strategy for each database (see Additional file 1 ). Forward and backward citation analysis of the included studies was performed using Web of Science.

Eligibility criteria

Study types and participants.

We included only studies with a quantitative design that looked at the prognosis of any health condition (real condition, hypothetical scenario, or fictitious condition). The only participation restriction was the exclusion of health professionals or health professional students. Studies of mixed populations (e.g. health professionals and patients) were eligible if data were reported separately for the eligible group. There was no limitation on study setting or publication language.

Interventions

Studies were eligible if they compared a visual presentation (e.g. a graph, words and numbers displayed in tabular format) with at least one another type of presentation (e.g. another type of graph, or free text) to display quantitative prognostic information and included a specified time frame (e.g. over the next 5 years) or time point (e.g. at 1 year). Prognostic information was defined as information about the likelihood of any future outcome in patients with a given health condition including those who received no treatment (natural history) or those who did.

Our primary outcome was comprehension of the presented information that was assessed using questions that required a quantitative answer (e.g. likelihood or duration of the outcome). For this reason, only some of the questions asked were eligible. Studies/data that assessed comprehension with questions requiring qualitative responses were ineligible. Secondary outcomes included: preferences for any of the presentations evaluated; satisfaction with the presentation; and behavioral intentions relevant to the information presented (e.g. intention to be screened).

Two authors (EA and MB) independently screened the titles and abstracts, and then the full text of potentially included studies. Discrepancies were resolved through consultation with the other two senior authors (CDM and TH).

Data extraction and risk of bias assessment

Data were extracted into a custom-designed spreadsheet. The studies’ characteristics (e.g., study settings, sampling methods, study design) and participants’ characteristics (e.g., age, sex, educational level, health literacy level, numeracy level, and the health condition studied). Intervention details (including type of presentation (e.g., bar graph), the presented information, who delivered the information, how, where and when the information was delivered), outcome details (including the eligible outcomes, how they were measured and at what timepoints) and result details (including number of responses analysed, follow up rate, results of eligible studies) are tabulated in the Additional file 1 and show the data extracted. Two authors (EA and MB) independently extracted relevant data and assessed risk of bias of included studies using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for randomized trials—version 2 (RoB2) [ 12 ]. Any discrepancies either in data extraction or risk of bias assessment were resolved by consulting the other two senior authors (CDM and TH).

Due to heterogeneity of the primary outcome measures (comprehension) and visual presentations used, we were unable to conduct a meta-analysis and therefore report the results narratively. The percentage of participants who answered each eligible question correctly are reported separately for each question and we calculated the average percentage correct across the eligible questions in each study. In studies that did not report the percentage correct for an individual question, we extracted the overall percentage correct for all comprehension questions as reported in the studies.

Modifications from the protocol

After reviewing the articles generated from our search, we added explicit exclusion criteria that were not detailed in our protocol. Studies that compared alternative statistical formats (e.g. relative risk reduction vs. absolute risk reduction) and studies that compared the framing (i.e. positive or negative) of health information were excluded as they have been previously synthesized [ 13 , 14 ]. Also excluded were studies that only compared methods of wording free text for conveying prognostic information. The eligibility of the primary outcome measure was also clarified to include questions that required participants to perform a quantitative calculation and then select the answer from categorical or dichotomous response options. The search strategy (see Additional file 1 ) was slightly modified by adding more MeSH terms (e.g., Comprehension, Knowledge, Data Display, Communication, Perception, “Decision Making, Shared”) at the request of reviewers during the peer-review process. This resulted in no additional eligible studies.

Our search identified 5648 articles across the databases and 614 articles identified through forward and backward citation analysis of the included studies (6262 in total), 5133 remained after duplicates were removed. After the full-text screening, we identified 9 articles: in 2 of these, 2 separate studies were reported, resulting in 11 eligible studies [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ] (Fig.  1 ).

PRISMA flow chart of systematic search and selection

Characteristics of included studies

All 11 included studies were randomized trials. Seven studies were conducted in the United States, 3 in Germany, and 1 in the United Kingdom. The total number of participants was 9737 (mean 885, range 120 to 2305). All participants were adults; 4 studies included only men, 3 studies included only women, 3 included both, and 1 did not report this. Eight studies were conducted online and 3 face-to-face. Health information in the interventions related to the prognosis of cancer (9 studies), middle ear infection (1 study), and multiple sclerosis (1 study). Details of the included studies are presented in the Table of characteristics (see Additional file 1 ).

Risk of bias assessment

The overall assessment of the risk of bias of the 11 studies was judged at “some concerns” level. All included articles were judged to have “some concerns” for at least one domain of risk of bias. Ten studies had “some concerns” for the selection of reported results and six had “some concerns” for their randomization process. (Fig.  2 a, b).

Risk of bias assessment of the included studies. a : overall, b : individual studies

Visual presentations evaluated

Details of the visual presentations evaluated are provided in the Additional file 1 (Table of interventions). Studies were grouped into 4 categories according to the presentation type they used: 6 studies compared a graphic format to another graphic format: 3 studies compared a bar graph to a pictograph/icon array, 2 studies compared survival curves to mortality curves, and 1 study compared two variations of pictographs (the last is covered in “other comparisons”. Four studies compared a graphic format to a tabular format (also known as a ‘fact box’), Three studies compared a tabular format to free text. (Fig.  3 ).

Interventions compared in the included studies. 1 A third group received both survival and mortality curve. 2 Eight interventions with variation of each format type were tested (3 pictographs, 2 bar graphs, 1 line graph, 2 pie graphs). 3 Four interventions: 2 static (bar graph, pictograph) and 2 animated (bar graph, pictograph). 4 Survival curves were delivered either in 5y or 15y worth data and the same for mortality curves. 5 Four interventions were tested (4-options pictograph, 4-options bar graph, 2-options pictograph, 2-options bar graph). 6 Two pictographs; a graph with survival only outcome versus a graph with multiple outcomes. 7 The three formats were embedded in fact box format, two studies were reported one face to face and one online. 8 Two conditions were tested in this study; only one contained prognostic information (middle ear infection) and was included. 9 Two studies were reported (breast cancer screening, female participants) and (prostate cancer screening, male participants). Each study tested 3 interventions (pictograph, tabular, free text). X refers to a study group

Primary outcome: comprehension

Graph versus graph (6 studies), bar graph versus pictograph (i.e. icon array) (3 studies).

Three studies compared bar graphs to pictographs (see Fig.  4 a). There was no statistically significant difference in comprehension between these types of graphs [ 17 , 18 , 21 ]. One of the studies enrolled 420 men and randomized them to 1 of 8 graph variations communicating the likelihood of recurrence of prostate cancer over 3-time points (including: 3 pictographs and 2 bar graphs variations). It found that 89% of participants who viewed pictographs (regardless of the variation shown) answered comprehension questions correctly compared to 87% of those who viewed bar graphs (regardless of the variation shown) [ 17 ].

Comprehension results of visual presentation comparisons ( a - d ). Graphs are different in each study (see Table of interventions in the Additional file 1 ). Questions are different in each study, for exact wording (see Table of outcomes in the Additional file 1 ). Kasper 2017 has 1 eligible question. Petrova 2015-1 and 2 reported the overall comprehension per format

In a study on breast cancer prognosis, 1619 participants were randomized to 1 of 4 graph variations (2 pictographs, 2 bar graphs), 51% of participants who viewed pictographs (regardless of the variation) answered comprehension questions correctly compared to 42% who viewed bar graphs (regardless of the variation) [ 21 ]. In a study with 682 people with multiple sclerosis, participants were randomized to 1 of 4 graph variations (2 pictographs, 2 bar graphs). The question about prognosis was answered correctly by 91% of those who viewed the pictograph, compared to 64% who viewed the bar graph [ 18 ].

Survival curves versus mortality curves (2 studies)

Two studies measured comprehension after presenting participants with either survival curves or mortality curves (Fig.  4 b). A study on the communication of breast cancer prognosis analyzed responses of 1461 participants and found that there was no difference in comprehension regardless of whether a survival or mortality curve was presented [ 22 ]. A study of 451 participants, using a colon cancer scenario, found that those who viewed survival curves scored significantly better than those who viewed mortality curves, with an average correct difference of 13%. A group of participants in the same study who were shown both survival and mortality curves performed slightly better than the group who only saw mortality curves, but the difference was not significant [ 15 ].

Graph versus tabular format (i.e. fact box) format (4 studies)

Four studies compared pictographs to a tabular format (Fig.  4 c). Two studies (reported in the same article, one conducted face-to-face and one online) used three groups to compare a tabular format alone, to a tabular format plus a single pictograph (that showed both benefits and harms), to a tabular format plus two pictographs (one showing benefits and one showing harms). In both studies, the authors reported that the interventions had a similar effect in facilitating comprehension. An average of 74% of participants who viewed the tabular format in the face-to-face study (75% in the online study) compared to 80% who viewed the pictographs (results from both pictograph formats combined) (60% in the online study) correctly answered comprehension questions [ 20 ].

Another article reported two studies: a study communicating prostate cancer screening information for male participants and a study communicating breast cancer screening for female participants. The study about prostate cancer found that the use of a pictograph format significantly improved comprehension ( P  = 0.003) compared to a tabular format, with 72% and 61% of participants answered correctly, respectively. Similar results were reported in the breast cancer study, with 62% of those who viewed the pictograph were able to answer the questions correctly compared to 58% who viewed the tabular format [ 19 ].

Tabular format versus text (3 studies)

Three studies compared a tabular format to a free text format (Fig.  4 d). Two studies (reported in the same article) found no significant difference between using a tabular format and free text to communicate prostate cancer prognosis to male participants and prognosis of breast cancer to female participants. In the prostate cancer study, 64% of participants who viewed the text format compared to 61% who viewed the tabular format answered the questions correctly. In the breast cancer study, 61% of those who viewed the text format answered correctly compared to 60% of those who viewed tabular format [ 19 ]. A study communicating prognosis of acute middle ear infection with and without antibiotics found that participants who saw a tabular format scored significantly higher on comprehension questions than those who saw a free text format (85% vs 72% correctly answering) [ 16 ].

Other comparisons

Static formats were better understood than animated formats when displayed online in a German web-based study of 682 people with multiple sclerosis [ 18 ]. Displays that contained less information were generally better understood than those with more as found in two studies conducted by the same author [ 21 , 23 ]. One of these found that pictographs with information about the outcome of two treatment alternatives, compared to those with four, were significantly better understood [ 21 ]. In the other study, pictographs that presented data for only one outcome (survival only; the number of women alive after 10 years who had treatment) were significantly better understood than pictographs that presented information about multiple outcomes (survival, mortality due to cancer, mortality due to all causes) [ 23 ].

Secondary outcomes

Format preference (1 study).

In the study that randomized participants to 1 of 8 formats (3 pictographs, 2 bar graphs, 1 line graph, 2 pie graphs), participants preferred the bar graph and thought they would understand it better than other formats. The pictograph was rated the lowest on both preference and expected understanding, regardless of the format they were randomized to. Overall, there was no statistically significant difference between graph preference and comprehension in this study [ 17 ].

Satisfaction (2 studies)

In a study that compared 4 visual presentations (2 bar graph variations, 2 pictograph variations), both the pictograph formats (4-options pictograph and 2-options pictograph) received statistically significantly higher satisfaction scores compared to the 4-options bar graph. However, even though participants were significantly more satisfied with the 2-options bar graph compared to the 4-options bar graph, the satisfaction scores were not as high as for the pictograph formats [ 21 ]. In another study, a pictograph that contained only survival data had significantly higher satisfaction scores than a pictograph showing multiple outcomes [ 23 ]. Participants of the study involving middle ear infection prognostic information reported being more engaged with the tabular format compared to the free text format [ 16 ].

Behavioral intentions (4 studies)

Participants in the communication of breast cancer prognosis study who viewed the survival-only pictograph were statistically significant less likely to say that they would have both chemotherapy and hormonal therapy compared to those who viewed the multiple outcome pictograph ( P  = 0.04) [ 23 ]. In a 3-arm study that used colon cancer information to compare survival curves, mortality curves, and both curves, participants who viewed survival curves were more likely to choose a preventive colectomy than an annual exam compared to the other two groups [ 15 ]. In the study of providing middle ear infection prognostic information, the format did not affect participants’ recommendation to a family member to use antibiotics [ 16 ]. Two studies on the communication of prostate cancer prognosis screening outcomes found no association between the type of presentation and the intention to be screened for prostate cancer at any measurement time point in two studies (one conducted online, one conducted face to face) [ 20 ].

Discussion and conclusion

Our main finding is that from the existing studies there does not appear to be a single type of visual presentation that is consistently superior over another for improving the comprehension of quantitative prognostic information for members of the public. In the few studies that examined this, simpler formats (such as one outcome instead of multiple, and fewer intervention options presented at one time) were generally better understood and achieved higher levels of satisfaction. The impact of various types of visual presentations on behavioral intention is inconsistent.

Many primary studies and reviews [ 9 , 10 , 13 , 14 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ], have investigated various methods of communicating treatment benefits and harms. While there are similarities between the communication of treatment benefits and harms and the communication of prognosis information, the extent to which methods identified as superior for communicating treatment quantitative information are also suitable for facilitating the comprehension of prognosis information is unknown. Similar to the findings of a review of methods of communicating quantitative treatment information [ 9 ], we found little difference between bar graphs and pictographs in facilitating comprehension and that there is no superior single method for conveying quantitative information.

Research on the comprehension of information from a survival curve with different variations found that comprehension was generally good across each variation [ 32 ]. Our review found inconsistent findings of the comparative effect of survival and mortality curves for the comprehension of prognosis information. However, we only identified two studies that had examined this. Details of the chosen curve, such as the complexity of information and the time frame used in the curve, maybe as important as the type of curve [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 ].

The strengths of our systematic review arise from the rigorous method of systematically identifying, screening, and reviewing the relevant literature. Our search was not limited by language; however, studies that do not have an English language title or abstract in the databases might have been missed. Although we searched six databases and conducted citation analysis of the included studies, we may have missed eligible studies. A meta-analysis was precluded due to heterogeneity of the included studies as they used many variations of visual presentations and comprehension was assessed with different measures. Most of the included studies were conducted online, using hypothetical scenarios with participants who did not have the condition being presented. Studies involving participants with the condition of interest may generate different impacts on comprehension, satisfaction, and decisions.

Few primary studies have compared the effectiveness of different visual presentations on the comprehension of quantitative prognostic information and more are needed. Most of the existing studies used cancer scenarios and so future research that explores other conditions would address this research gap, as would head-to-head studies that compare the different presentations. As the superiority of any single visual presentation was not established in this review, visual presentations should be co-designed and piloted with the target population before widespread use.

From the existing research, there is inconsistency about the superiority of a particular visual presentation to use when discussing quantitative prognostic information with patients. Any of the existing visual presentations that were identified in this review may be suitable to use to aid comprehension.

Practice implication

Any of the visual presentations identified may be suitable to aid clinicians in discussing prognostic information with patients or their carers. More primary research is needed to identify how patients or the general public understand the prognostic information. Piloting any newly developed tool to communicate prognosis with the target population is highly recommended.

Availability of data and materials

The protocol of this review is registered at PROSPERO (CRD42020192564) and can be found in the Open Science Framework osf.io/ze26g. More information is provided in the Additional file 1 . The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Justin Clark for his consultation and valuable advice in the development of the search strategy.

No specific funding was received for this systematic review; however, the first author is supported on a PhD scholarship which is funded by the Centre for Research Excellence in Minimising Antibiotic Resistance in the Community (CRE-MARC), funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia (Reference Number: 1153299). CDM and TH are chief investigators of CREMARC and MB is employed as a postdoctoral research fellow on this grant.

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EA, TH, CDM conceived the study, EA developed the search strategy with consultation from TH, CDM and information specialist Justin Clark. EA and MB screened, assessed the eligibility, and assessed the quality of the included studies with consultation from TH and CDM. EA analysed the data and created the figures with consultation from TH and CDM. EA is responsible for the data management and storage. EA drafted the manuscript, and all authors reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version for submission.

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Supplementary Information

Additional file 1.

: the additional file includes: Search strategy, Table of characteristics, Table of interventions,Table of outcomes, and Table of excluded studies.

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Abukmail, E., Bakhit, M., Del Mar, C. et al. Effect of different visual presentations on the comprehension of prognostic information: a systematic review. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 21 , 249 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01612-9

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Received : 24 March 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01612-9

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E-Commerce on Startup: A Systematic Literature Review

• Agung Purnomo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8146-9753 7 ,
• Mega Firdaus   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9291-2183 8 ,
• Yogi Tri Prasetyo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3535-9657 9 ,
• Elsa Rosyidah   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9415-4067 8 ,
• Satria Fadil Persada   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8141-1957 7 ,
• Thalea Christy Nathaniela   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5844-8153 7 &
• Fairuz Iqbal Maulana   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8740-1530 7  
• Conference paper
• First Online: 24 September 2023

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Part of the book series: EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing ((EAISICC))

This study’s objectives include reviewing the existing literature and studying e-commerce on startups. The PRISMA protocols for performing and reporting systematic reviews were implemented when conducting a systematic literature review. The Scopus database was thoroughly searched, and 22 peer-reviewed papers were found. The research program was provided, such as publication sources, disciplines, and geographic location. E-commerce on startups was grouped to highlight the focus on particular elements and the direction of future research in this field.

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This research was funded by Mapúa University Directed Research for Innovation and Value Enhancement (DRIVE).

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Purnomo, A. et al. (2024). E-Commerce on Startup: A Systematic Literature Review. In: Marmolejo-Saucedo, J.A., Rodríguez-Aguilar, R., Vasant, P., Litvinchev, I., Retana-Blanco, B.M. (eds) Computer Science and Engineering in Health Services. COMPSE 2022. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34750-4_8

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Scientific Presenting: Using Evidence-Based Classroom Practices to Deliver Effective Conference Presentations

Lisa a. corwin.

† Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309

Amy Prunuske

‡ Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Medical College of Wisconsin–Central Wisconsin, Wausau, WI 54401

Shannon B. Seidel

§ Biology Department, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447

Scientific presenting is the use of scientific teaching principles—active learning, equity, and assessment—in conference presentations to improve learning, engagement, and inclusiveness. This essay presents challenges presenters face and suggestions for how presenters can incorporate active learning strategies into their scientific presentations.

Scientists and educators travel great distances, spend significant time, and dedicate substantial financial resources to present at conferences. This highlights the value placed on conference interactions. Despite the importance of conferences, very little has been studied about what is learned from the presentations and how presenters can effectively achieve their goals. This essay identifies several challenges presenters face when giving conference presentations and discusses how presenters can use the tenets of scientific teaching to meet these challenges. We ask presenters the following questions: How do you engage the audience and promote learning during a presentation? How do you create an environment that is inclusive for all in attendance? How do you gather feedback from the professional community that will help to further advance your research? These questions target three broad goals that stem from the scientific teaching framework and that we propose are of great importance at conferences: learning, equity, and improvement. Using a backward design approach, we discuss how the lens of scientific teaching and the use of specific active-learning strategies can enhance presentations, improve their utility, and ensure that a presentation is broadly accessible to all audience members.

Attending a conference provides opportunities to share new discoveries, cutting-edge techniques, and inspiring research within a field of study. Yet after presenting at some conferences, you might leave feeling as though you did not connect with the audience, did not receive useful feedback, or are unsure of where you fit within the professional community. Deciding what to cover in a presentation may be daunting, and you may worry that the audience did not engage in your talk. Likewise, for audience members, the content of back-to-back talks may blur together, and they may get lost in acronyms or other unfamiliar jargon. Audience members who are introverted or new to the field may feel intimidated about asking a question in front of a large group containing well-known, outspoken experts. After attending a conference, one may leave feeling curious and excited or exhausted and overwhelmed, wondering what was gained from presenting or attending.

Conferences vary widely in purpose and location, ranging from small conferences hosted within home institutions to large international conferences featuring experts from around the world. The time and money spent to host, attend, and present at conferences speaks to the value placed on engaging in these professional interactions. Despite the importance of conferences to professional life, there is rarely time to reflect on what presenters and other conference attendees learn from participating in conferences or how conferences promote engagement and equity in the field as a whole. A significant portion of most conference time is devoted to the delivery of oral presentations, which traditionally are delivered in a lecture style, with questions being initiated by a predictable few during question-and-answer sessions.

In this essay, we discuss how you can use a backward design approach and scientific presenting strategies to overcome three key challenges to effectively presenting to diverse conference audiences. The challenges we consider here include the following:

• Engagement in learning: ensuring that your audience is engaged and retains what is important from a talk
• Promoting equity: creating an environment that is inclusive of all members of the research field
• Receiving feedback: gathering input from the professional community to improve as a researcher and presenter

At conferences, learning and advancement of a field is paramount, similar to more formal educational settings. Thus, we wrote these presenting challenges to align with the central themes presented in the scientific teaching framework developed by Handelsman and colleagues (2007) . “Learning” aligns with “active learning,” “equity” with “diversity,” and “feedback” with “assessment.” Using the scientific teaching framework and a backward design approach, we propose using evidence-based teaching strategies for scientific presenting in order to increase learning, equity, and quality feedback. We challenge you , the presenter, to consider how these strategies might benefit your future presentations.

BACKWARD DESIGN YOUR PRESENTATION: GOALS AND AUDIENCE CONSIDERATIONS

How will you define the central goals of your presentation and frame your presentation based on these goals? Begin with the end in mind by clearly defining your presentation goals before developing content and activities. This is not unlike the process of backward design used to plan effective learning experiences for students ( McTighe and Thomas, 2003 ). Consider what you, as a presenter, want to accomplish. You may want to share results supporting a novel hypothesis that may impact the work of colleagues in your field or disseminate new techniques or methodologies that could be applied more broadly. You may seek feedback about an ongoing project. Also consider your audience and what you hope they will gain from attending. You may want to encourage your colleagues to think in new and different ways or to create an environment of collegiality. It is good to understand your audience’s likely goals, interests, and professional identities before designing your presentation.

How can you get to know these important factors about your audience? Although it may not be possible to predict or know all aspects of your audience, identify sources of information you can access to learn more about them. Conference organizers, the website for the conference, and previous attendees may be good sources of information about who might be in attendance. Conference organizers may have demographic information about the institution types and career stages of the audience. The website for a conference or affiliated society often describes the mission of the organization or conference. Finally, speaking with individuals who have previously attended the conference may help you understand the culture and expectations of your audience. This information may enable you to tailor your talk and select strategies that will engage and resonate with audience members of diverse backgrounds. Most importantly, reflecting on the information you gather will allow you to evaluate and better define your presentation goals.

Before designing your presentation, write between two and five goals you have for yourself or your audience (see Vignettes 1 and 2 for sample goals). Prioritize your goals and evaluate which can be accomplished with the time, space, and audience constraints you face. Once you have established both your goals and knowledge of who might attend your talk, it is time to design your talk. The Scientific Presenting section that follows offers specific design suggestions to engage the audience in learning, promote equity, and receive high-quality feedback.

Situation: Mona Harrib has been asked to give the keynote presentation at a regional biology education research conference. As a leader in the field, Mona is well known and respected, and she has a good grasp on where the field has been and where it is going now.

Presentation Goals: She has three goals she wants to accomplish with her presentation: 1) to introduce her colleagues to the self-efficacy framework, 2) to provide new members of her field opportunities to learn about where the field has been, and 3) to connect these new individuals with others in the field.

Scientific Presenting Strategy: Mona has 50 minutes for her presentation, with 10 minutes for questions. Her opening slide, displayed as people enter the room, encourages audience members to “sit next to someone you have not yet spoken to.” Because her talk will discuss self-efficacy theory and the various origins of students’ confidence in their ability to do science, she begins by asking the audience members to introduce themselves to their neighbors and to describe an experience in which they felt efficacious or confident in their ability to do something and why they felt confident.  She circulates around the room, and asks five groups to share their responses. This provides an audience-generated foundation that she uses to explain the framework in more detail. For historical perspective, she relates each framework component back to prior research in the field. She ends with some recent work from her research group and asks participants to discuss with their partners how the framework could be used to explain the results of her recent study. She again gathers and reports several examples to the whole group that illustrate ways in which the data might be interpreted. She then asks the audience to write a question that they still have about this research on note cards, which she collects and reviews after the presentation. After reviewing the cards, she decides to incorporate a little more explanation about a few graphs in her work to help future audiences digest the information.

Situation: Antonio Villarreal is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who has recently been selected for a 15-minute presentation in the Endocytic Trafficking Minisymposium at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting. He has attended this conference twice, so he has a sense of the audience, space, and culture of the meeting. In his past experiences, he has found that the talks often blur together, and it is especially difficult to remember key ideas from the later talks in each session.

Presentation Goals: With a manuscript in preparation and his upcoming search for a faculty position, Antonio has the following three goals for his presentation: 1) to highlight the significance of his research in a memorable way; 2) to keep the audience engaged, because his presentation is the ninth out of 10 talks; and 3) to receive feedback that will prepare him to give professional job talks.

Scientific Presenting Strategy: Antonio took a class as a postdoctoral fellow about evidence-based practices in teaching and decides he would like to incorporate some active learning into his talk to help his audience learn. He worries that with only 15 minutes he does not have a lot of time to spare. So he sets up the background and experimental design for the audience and then projects only the two axes of his most impactful graph on the screen with a question mark in the middle where the data would be. Rather than simply showing the result, he asks the audience to turn to a neighbor and make a prediction about the results they expect to see. He cues the audience to talk to one another by encouraging them to make a bold prediction! After 30 seconds, he quells the chatter and highlights two different predictions he heard from audience members before sharing the results. At the end of his presentation, he asks the audience to turn to a neighbor once again and discuss what the results mean and what experiment they would try next. He also invites them to talk further with him after the session. The questions Antonio receives after his talk are very interesting and help him consider alternative angles he could pursue or discuss during future talks. He also asks his colleague Jenna to record his talk on his iPhone, and he reviews this recording after the session to prepare him for the job market.

SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING: USING A SCIENTIFIC TEACHING PERSPECTIVE TO DESIGN CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Presenters, like teachers, often try to help their audiences connect new information with what they already know ( National Research Council, 2000 ). While a conference audience differs from a student audience, evidence and strategies collected from the learning sciences can assist in designing presentations to maximize learning and engagement. We propose that the scientific teaching framework, developed by Handelsman and colleagues (2007) to aid in instructional design, can be used as a tool in developing presentations that promote learning, are inclusive, and allow for the collection of useful feedback. In this section, we discuss the three pillars of scientific teaching: active learning, diversity, and assessment. We outline how they can be used to address the central challenges outlined earlier and provide specific tips and strategies for applying scientific teaching in a conference setting.

Challenge: Engagement in Learning

Consider the last conference you attended: How engaged were you in the presentations? How many times did you check your phone or email? How much did you learn from the talks you attended? Professional communities are calling for more compelling presentations that convey information successfully to a broad audience (e.g., Carlson and Burdsall, 2014 ; Langin, 2017 ). Active-learning strategies, when combined with constructivist approaches, are one way to increase engagement, learning, and retention ( Prince, 2004 ; Freeman et al. , 2014 ). While active-learning strategies are not mutually exclusive with the use of PowerPoint presentations in the dissemination of information, they do require thoughtful design, time for reflection, and interaction to achieve deeper levels of learning ( Chi and Wylie, 2014 ). This may be as simple as allowing 30–60 seconds for prediction or discussion in a 15-minute talk. On the basis of calls for change from conference goers and organizers and research on active-learning techniques, we have identified several potential benefits of active learning likely to enhance engagement in conference presentations:

• Active learning increases engagement and enthusiasm. Active learning allows learners to maintain focus and enthusiasm throughout a learning experience (e.g., Michael, 2006 ). Use of active learning may particularly benefit audience members attending long presentations or sessions with back-to-back presenters.
• Active learning improves retention of information. Active reflection and discussion with peers supports incorporation of information into one’s own mental models and creates the connections required for long-term retention of information (reviewed in Prince, 2004 ).
• Active learning allows for increased idea exchange among participants. Collaborative discourse among individuals with differing views enhances learning, promotes argumentation, and allows construction of new knowledge ( Osborne, 2010 ). Active-learning approaches foster idea exchange and encourage interaction, allowing audience members to hear various perspectives from more individuals.
• Active learning increases opportunities to build relationships and expand networks. Professional networking is important for expansion of professional communities, enhancing collaborations, and fostering idea exchange. Short collaborative activities during presentations can be leveraged to build social networks and foster community in a professional setting, similar to how they are used in instruction ( Kember and Leung, 2005 ; Kuh et al ., 2006 ).

While a multitude of ways to execute active learning exist, we offer a few specific suggestions to quickly engage the audience during a conference presentation ( Table 1 ). In the spirit of backward design, we encourage you to identify learning activities that support attainment of your presentation goals. Some examples can be found in Vignettes 1 and 2 (section 1), which illustrate hypothetical scenarios in which active learning is incorporated into presentations at professional conferences to help meet specific goals.

Active-learning strategies for conference presentations

Similar to giving a practice talk before the conference, we encourage you to test out active-learning strategies in advance, particularly if you plan to incorporate technology, because technological problems can result in disengagement ( Hatch et al ., 2005 ). Practicing presentation activities within a research group or local community will provide guidance on prompts, timing, instructions, and audience interpretation to identify problems and solutions before they occur during a presentation. This will help to avoid activities that are overly complex or not purpose driven ( Andrew et al ., 2011 ).

Challenge: Equity and Participation

Consider the last conference you attended: Did you hear differing opinions about your work or did the dominant paradigms prevail? Who asked questions; was it only high-status experts in the field? Did you hear from multiple voices? Did newer members, like graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, engage with established members of the community? In classroom settings, equity and diversity strategies improve learning among all students and particularly support students from underrepresented groups in science by decreasing feelings of exclusion, alleviating anxiety, and counteracting stereotype threat ( Haak et al ., 2011 ; Walton et al ., 2012 ; Eddy and Hogan, 2014 ). Likewise, in a conference setting, strategies that promote equitable participation and recognize the positive impact of diversity in the field may help increase equity more broadly and promote a sense of belonging among participants. Conference audiences are oftentimes even more diverse than the typical classroom environment, being composed of individuals from different disciplines, career stages, and cultures. Incorporating strategies that increase the audience’s understanding and feelings of inclusion in the professional community may impact whether or not an individual continues to engage in the field. We have identified three central benefits of equity strategies for presenters and their professional communities:

• Equity strategies increase accessibility and learning. As a presenter, you should ensure that presentations and presentation materials 1) allow information to be accessed in various forms, so that differently abled individuals may participate fully, and 2) use straightforward language and representations. You can incorporate accessible versions of conference materials (e.g., captioned videos) or additional resources, such as definitions of commonly used jargon necessary to the presentation (e.g., Miller and Tanner, 2015 ). You may consider defining jargon or acronyms in your talk to increase accessibility for individuals who might struggle to understand the full meaning (e.g., new language learners or individuals who are new to the field).

Equity strategies for conference presentations (as presented in Tanner, 2013 )

• Equity strategies promote a sense of belonging among all individuals. Creating a welcoming, inclusive environment will make the community attractive to new members and help to increase community members’ sense of belonging. Sense of belonging helps individuals in a community to view themselves as valued and important, which serves to motivate these individuals toward productive action. This increases positive affect, boosts overall community morale, and supports community development ( Winter-Collins and McDaniel, 2000 ). Belonging can increase if it is specifically emphasized as important and if individuals make personal connections to others, such as during small-group work (see Table 2 ).

Many strategies discussed in prior sections, such as using active learning and having clear goals, help to promote equity, belonging, and access. In Table 2 , we expand on previously mentioned strategies and discuss how specific active-learning and equity strategies promote inclusiveness. These tips for facilitation are primarily drawn from Tanner’s 2013 feature on classroom structure, though they apply to the conference presentation setting as well.

An overarching goal of conferences is to help build a thriving, creative, inclusive, and accessible community. Being transparent about which equity strategies you are using and why you are using them may help to promote buy-in and encourage others to use similar strategies. By taking the above actions as presenters and being deliberate in our incorporation of equity and diversity strategies, we can help our professional communities to thrive, innovate, and grow.

Challenge: Receiving Feedback

Consider your last conference presentation: What did you take away from the presentation? Did you gather good ideas during the session? Were the questions and comments you received useful for advancing your work? If you were to present this work again, what changes might you make? In the classroom, assessment drives learning of content, concepts, and skills. At conferences, we, as presenters, take the role of instructor in teaching our peers (including members of our research field) about new findings and innovations. However, assessment at conferences differs from classroom assessment in important ways. First, at conferences, you are unlikely to present to the same audience multiple times; therefore, the focus of the assessment is purely formative—to determine whether the presentation accomplished its goals. This feedback can aid in your professional development toward being an effective communicator. Second, at conferences, you are speaking to a diverse group of colleagues who have varied expertise, and feedback from the audience will provide information that may improve your research. Indeed, conferences are a prime environment to draw on a diversity of expertise to identify relevant information, resources, and alternative interpretations of data. These characteristics of conferences give rise to three possible types of presentation assessments ( Hattie and Timperley, 2007 ):

• Feed-up: assessment of the achievement of presentation goals: Did I achieve my goals as a presenter?
• Feed-back: assessment of whether progress toward project goals is being achieved: Is my disciplinary work or research progressing effectively?
• Feed-forward: input on which activities should be undertaken next: What are the most important next steps in this work for myself and my professional community?

Though a lot of feedback at conferences occurs in informal settings, you can take the initiative to incorporate assessment strategies into your presentation. Many of the simple classroom techniques described in the preceding sections, like polling the audience and hearing from multiple voices, support quick assessment of presentation outcomes ( Angelo and Cross, 1993 ). In Table 3 , we elaborate on possible assessment strategies and provide tips for gathering effective feedback during presentations.

Assessment and feedback strategies for conference presentations

a We suggest these questions for a simple, yet informative postpresentation feed-up survey about your presentation: What did you find most interesting about this presentation? What, if anything, was unclear or were you confused about (a.k.a. muddiest point)? What is one thing that would improve this presentation? Similarly, to gather information for a feedback/feed-forward assessment, we recommend: What did you find most interesting about this work? What about this project needs improvement or clarification? What do you consider an important next step that this work might take?

Technology can assist in implementing assessment, and we predict that there will be many future technological innovations applicable to the conference setting. Live tweeting or backchanneling is occurring more frequently alongside presentations, with specific hashtags that allow audience members to initiate discussions and generate responses from people who are not even in the room ( Wilkinson et al ., 2015 ). After the presentation, you and your audience members can continue to share feedback and materials through email list servers and QR codes. Self-assessment by reviewing a video from the session can support both a better understanding of audience engagement and self-reflection ( van Ginkel et al ., 2015 ). There are benefits from gathering data from multiple assessment strategies, but as we will discuss in the next section, there are barriers that impact the number of recommended learning, equity, and assessment strategies you might chose to implement.

NAVIGATING BARRIERS TO SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING

Though we are strong advocates for a scientific presenting approach, there are several important barriers to consider. These challenges are similar to what is faced in the classroom, including time, space, professional culture, and audience/student expectations.

One of the most important barriers to consider is culture, as reflected in the following quote:

Ironically, the oral presentations are almost always presented as lectures, even when the topic of the talk is about how lecturing is not very effective! This illustrates how prevalent and influential the assumptions are about the expected norms of behavior and interaction at a scientific conference. Even biologists who have strong teaching identities and are well aware of more effective ways to present findings choose, for whatever reason (professional culture? professional identity?), not to employ evidence-based teaching and communication methods in the venue of a scientific conference. ( Brownell and Tanner, 2012 , p. 344)

As this quote suggests, professional identity and power structures exist within conference settings that may impact the use of scientific presenting strategies. Trainees early in their careers will be impacted by disciplinary conference norms and advisor expectations and should discuss incorporating new strategies with a trusted mentor. In addition, incorporating scientific presenting strategies can decrease your control as a presenter and may even invoke discomfort and threaten your or your audience’s professional identities.

Balance between content delivery and active engagement presents another potential barrier. Some may be concerned that active learning takes time away from content delivery or that using inclusive practices compromises the clarity of a central message. Indeed, there is a trade-off between content and activity, and presenters have to balance presenting more results with time spent on active learning that allows the audience to interpret the results. We suggest that many of these difficulties can be solved by focusing on your goals and audience background, which will allow you to identify which content is critical and hone your presentation messaging to offer the maximum benefit to the audience. Remember that coverage of content does not ensure learning or understanding and that you can always refer the audience to additional content or clarifying materials by providing handouts or distributing weblinks to help them engage as independent learners.

Physical space and time may limit participants’ interaction with you and one another. Try to view your presentation space in advance and consider how you will work within and possibly modify that space. For example, if you will present in a traditional lecture hall, choose active learning that can be completed by an individual or pairs instead of a group. By being aware of the timing, place in the conference program, and space allotted, you can identify appropriate activities and strategies that will fit your presentation and have a high impact. Available technology, support, and resources will also impact the activities and assessments you can implement and may alleviate some space and time challenges.

As novice scientific presenters dealing with the above barriers and challenges, “failures” or less than ideal attempts at scientific presenting are bound to occur. The important thing to remember is that presenting is a scientific process, and just as experiments rarely work perfectly the first time they are executed, so too does presenting in a new and exciting way. Just as in science, challenges and barriers can be overcome with time, iterations, and thoughtful reflection.

STRUCTURING A CONFERENCE TO FACILITATE SCIENTIFIC PRESENTING

Although presenters can opt to use backward design and incorporate scientific presenting strategies, they do not control other variables like the amount of time allotted to each speaker, the size or shape of the room they present in, or the technology available. These additional constraints are still important and may impact a presenter’s ability to use audience-centered presentation methods. Conference organizers are in a powerful position to support presenters’ ability to implement the described strategies and to provide the necessary logistical support to maximize the likelihood of success. Organizers often set topics, determine the schedule, book spaces, identify presenters, and help establish conference culture.

So how can conference organizers affect change that will promote active engagement and equity in conference presentations?

• Use backward design for the conference as a whole. Just as presenters can use backward design to set their specific learning goals, conference organizers can set goals for the meeting as a whole to support the conference community.
• Vary conference structures and formats based on the needs of the community. Conference presentation structures vary widely, but it is worth considering why certain session structures are used. To what extent does it serve the community to have back-to-back 10-minute talks for several hours? Many people will have the chance to present, but does the audience gain anything? Are there topics that would be better presented in a workshop format or a roundtable discussion? What other structures might benefit the conference community and their goals?
• Choose a space that is conducive to active presentations or consider creative ways to use existing spaces. The spaces available for conferences are typically designed for lecture formats. However, organizers can seek out spaces that facilitate active presenting by choosing rooms with adaptable formats in which furniture can be moved to facilitate small-group discussions. They can also provide tips on how to work within existing spaces, such as encouraging participants to sit near the front of a lecture hall or auditorium.
• Give explicit expectations to presenters. Organizers could inform presenters that active, engaging, evidence-based sessions are encouraged or expected. This will help cultivate the use of scientific presenting within the community.
• Provide examples or support for presenters to aid in design of active learning, equity strategies, and assessment. Videos with examples of the described techniques, a quick reference guide, or access to experts within the field who would be willing to mentor presenters could be critical for supporting a conference culture that uses scientific presenting. For example, researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a repository of active-learning videos and instructions for instructors interested in developing these skills (REALISE—Repository for Envisioning Active-Learning Instruction in Science Education, https://seercenter.uga.edu/ realisevideos_howto ).
• Collect evidence about conference structure and use it to inform changes. Surveying audience members and presenters to better understand the benefits and challenges of particular session formats can help inform changes over multiple years. Organizers should coordinate these efforts with presenters so they are aware of what data will be collected and disseminated back to them.

Although scientific teaching has increasingly become standard practice for evidence-based teaching of science courses, there are potentially great benefits for transforming our oral presentations in science and science education by incorporating the rigor, critical thinking, and experimentation that are regularly employed within research. The strategies suggested in this paper can serve as a starting point for experimentation and evaluation of presentation and conference efficacy. Using scientific presentation strategies may expedite the advancement of fields by increasing engagement and learning at conference presentations. Equity strategies can increase inclusion and community building among members of our research areas, which will help research fields to grow and diversify. Finally, regularly incorporating assessment into our presentations should improve the quality and trajectory of research projects, further strengthening the field. Both individual presenters and conference organizers have a role to play in shifting conference culture to tackle the challenges presented in this paper. We urge you to consider your role in taking action.

Acknowledgments

We thank Justin Hines, Jenny Knight, and Kimberly Tanner for thoughtful suggestions on early drafts of this article.

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