How to present your research in conferences?

Professor: What do you think about my presentation? What makes my presentation interesting?

Studnet 1: At first, your presentation told an interesting story. For the first two slides, you use examples and interesting narratives to attract audiences. Secondly, you add a lot of pictures in the presentation, which makes it not boring.

Student 2: I think one advantage of your presentation is that you can interact with audiences, making all of us felt related to the study.

Student 3: In my opinion, telling story is very important. You provide background about the study and provide police officers examples, which show that Officer safety is a big problem in the urban area. This is a good way to attract people’s attention.

Student 4: I think keeping voice up and down also helps attract the audience. If the presenter’s voice lacks variations, it will make the presentation boring.

Professor: Yes. At first, you need to learn how to present your research in a limited time. It will be more difficult to present your research in 15 minutes than 20 minutes. Once, I was asked to present my research in 12 minutes. So it is not possible to show every detail of your research. For a conference presentation, you cannot talk about everything. What do you think is the purpose of the conference presentation?

Student 3: I think conference presentation could help us get ideas from others. People will connect their research interests with your study, and give valuable opinions. Also, it provides a good opportunity to present your research to potential reviewers. Thus, they can offer you some feedbacks before the review process. It is like a practice.

Student 4: Sometimes, we may be too focused on our ideas and think our study are very interesting. But it is important for us to show it to others and get ideas from the people who are not familiar with the study. They probably will point out problems that cannot be discovered by us.

Student 5: I think one important purpose of conference presentation is to make self-advertisement. You are trying to sell your research to others.

Student 1: I always try to explain my research to my parents. Present research to people who are not familiar with the research can get new insights. Also, we can learn something during the presentation process.

Professor: Yes. You make a good point. You will act as a salesman in a conference. You want to sell your research to the potential editors and reviewers. That’s the function of a conference. Obviously, you don’t have much time to tell everything. You need to convince audiences that you are doing interesting research. It is very important to grasp their intentions. So you don’t want to start your presentation with boring statements, such as “Mobile industry is a big industry (ambiguous)”. You need to think about how to grasp their intentions. An excellent presentation takes a lot of practices.

One thing in my presentation is that I didn’t use text until the page 14. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. So when I prepared a presentation, I spend a lot of time on finding good pictures.

Student 2: Can you share some tips on how to practice? What is the most effective way to practice?

Professor: Present your research to the audience who knows nothing about the research is a good way to practice. I always present my research in front of my wife, and she gives me interesting advice. Also, you can gather some friends or colleagues and practice in front of them.

About texts and figures, I use texts because I did not want to memorize my script. I can look up the slide and explain. But if you use figures, you have to memorize everything. However, in a presentation, you don’t want always to watch the screen, which makes less interaction between you and the audience. Remember, a good presentation is a two-way communication. Another important point is that if you don’t know how to use animation, you’d better avoid it.

Student 3: Yes. Once I tried to insert five slides content into one slide. If the computer in the presentation room is not compatible with yours, the animation will change. It will not achieve the expected results.

Professor: Yes. I don’t recommend you using too much animation. Also, it is a good idea to show context using graphs and numbers.

Student 3: I think another advantage of your presentation is that you can keep the audience calm and avoid their questions. I also noticed that you did not show the literature and theory part in the slides.

Professor: Yes. I don’t like showing literature review in a presentation. If you show the literature review part in your presentation, it maybe not an interesting research from the beginning. You have to demonstrate this is a new and interesting research without literature review. Showing literature review means you are just a follower. Of course, some people have different opinions about this.

Also, I skipped the robustness check fast, because I think it is not the core part of my study. You don’t want to spend a lot of time at the end of the presentation. I just showed the summarized results and contributions. Please think hard about which part of your research is more important and what is not. However, people always like to ask questions about details. In this case, you can prepare extra slides to show literature reviews, definitions, and correlation table. When someone asks specific questions, you can show them these details.

Student 4: Can you provide some tips for the Q&A section?

Professor: My advice is that practice is important. At first, I was also scared about the Q&A part. You probably will get similar questions. So it is a good idea to go over the first round review from a journal. Then you can prepare what kind of questions you will meet. For a conference presentation, it is more important to sell your story than to get comments. My experience tells me that sometimes it was difficult to get valuable feedbacks.

Student 3: One of my advisors likes to send papers to a lot of people and get feedbacks. When you present your work, audiences may not totally understand what you are doing. It is a very limited time window. But if you sent papers to them, they have more time to read it. Then they probably will provide more valuable feedbacks.

Professor: Yes. You could ask friendly reviews. But remember, you cannot nominate these as your reviewers when you submit the paper to journals.

Student 1: My question is that what is the condition to be nominated?

Professor: People who have the conflict of interest should not be nominated. These include teachers, colleagues, coauthors ( a five-year window). Reviewers are supposed to be someone without the conflict of interest.