(272) Academic Conference Posters: A Systematic Review of Rubrics

Objective : While academic posters are common at professional conferences, various rubrics have assessed the quality of posters. We aimed to summarize the various scoring rubrics in the literature to assess quality of presented posters.

Methods: We systematically searched 10 databases including MEDLINE, Web of Science Core Collection, CINAHL, and Education Research Complete. This yielded 2226 articles, of which 558 remained after title and abstract screening. After, we categorized articles into ‘how-to’, ‘student/education’, ‘rubrics/scoring instruments’, ‘technology-innovations’, and ‘other’. Thereafter, two reviewers independently evaluated each article categorized as ‘rubrics/scoring’ and coded each article for reported rubric characteristics. This review was limited to journal articles; no books or other gray-literature were uncovered in the search.

Results: Twenty-three articles were ‘rubric/scoring’, wherein 11 evaluated conference posters while 10 evaluated classroom posters. Medicine (9/11) and nursing (2/11) were professions that published their rubrics. Many rubrics were newly-created (7/11) by authors, a few were modified from the literature (3/11), only one used a previously-created rubric (1/11). Validity evidence was not reported for most (8/11), and only three articles reported reliability of scores. Most articles used analytic rubrics (9/11), while only two (2/11) reported holistic rubrics. The median number of posters evaluated was 31, though two articles did not report any empirical rubric use. The most common rubric dimensions were minimizing text, optimizing layout, figure quality, objectives, key points, and identifying poster authors.

Conclusions: This systematic review identified few rubrics in the literature. Most reported no psychometric evidence for their use. While two of the rubrics were holistic and eleven were analytic, none were created using a mixed-approach (integrating holistic & analytic), which may help to quickly score poster quality for meta-research.