Each year, scientists present countless research posters at conferences, symposia and academic gatherings, making the poster one of the most common—and most visible—forms of scientific communication. Yet despite its ubiquity, the research poster has received surprisingly little attention from communication scholars. Unlike journal articles, grant proposals or science journalism, posters have largely escaped rigorous scrutiny as a medium for conveying complex ideas.

Instead, poster design advice tends to come from self-anointed experts offering guidelines rooted in personal taste or generic principles of visual design. While visual appeal is important, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for telling a compelling research story. Most scientists I know are far more interested in understanding innovative ideas and meaningful results than in having an aesthetically pleasing experience.

In new research, my coauthors and I sought to address this gap. Drawing on cognitive science and document design principles, we propose a new format for research posters—one that prioritizes clarity and comprehension over visual flair. We call this the complete sentence heading format.

Complete Sentence Headings Help Readers Understand and Retain Content

Traditional posters typically use short, topical headings like “Introduction,” “Methods” and “Results.” These headings serve as organizational markers but do little to communicate the actual content. In contrast, our format replaces these vague labels with complete, declarative sentences that convey the key message of each section. For example, instead of “Results,” a heading might read: “Monoclinic BiVO₄ demonstrates domain selectivity for photochemical reduction reactions.”

Beneath each sentence heading, we include supporting figures and text that elaborate on the claim. The result is a poster that functions like a visual abstract—readers can scan the headings to grasp the research story and dive deeper into the data as needed. (See figure below.)

A sample poster using complete sentence headings to communicate the research story.

We put our design to the test in a series of small, A/B comparison design studies.

In our pilot study, we recruited undergraduates from diverse majors and asked them to read posters using either traditional short headings or our complete sentence headings. Afterward, students took a quiz assessing their recall of the poster content. Across both technical and nontechnical posters, students who read the complete sentence format recalled significantly more information. They also expressed a strong preference for this format, citing its clarity and ease of understanding.

We then surveyed engineering faculty. Like the students, faculty overwhelmingly preferred the complete sentence format. They found it easier to scan, quicker to interpret and more informative than traditional designs.

Complete Sentence Headings Have Advantages Over the #BetterPoster Format

We also compared our format to the popular #BetterPoster design, which has been featured in outlets including National Public Radio, The Boston Globe and, yes, Inside Higher Ed. Created by a psychology graduate student, the #BetterPoster format centers around a single large “splash” sentence—essentially a billboard-style headline—summarizing the main result. Clustered in the margins are supplementary images, graphs and text for the presenter to explain during the poster session. A QR code links to the full paper.

To its credit, the #BetterPoster format excels at grabbing attention. The bold headline and sparse layout are visually striking. But attention alone is not enough. If our goal is to foster understanding, we must go beyond aesthetics.

Engineering faculty had mixed opinions about the #betterposter research design. One faculty member enthusiastically declared, “Absolutely love it!” Another lamented, “I wish to never see [another #betterposter] template for as long as I live.” Overall, faculty were more critical than supportive of this design with many noting that the format lacks enough context to allow them to understand the research motivation, methodology or complex findings. One participant elaborated: “I thought the ‘better poster’ was easy to read, but too focused to give me a full view of the study. I really liked the topic sentences [in the complete sentence version] instead of traditional headers. Gives me the right level of detail.”

Why Complete Sentence Headings Work

The effectiveness of complete sentence headings is not accidental—it is grounded in well-established principles from cognitive science. By stating the main point of each section in a single, clear sentence, these headings provide coherence that helps audiences actively connect new information with what they already know. When the central idea is explicit, readers can more easily organize details into mental frameworks, which improves both short-term comprehension and long-term retention. In this way, the heading functions as a concise preview that reduces cognitive load and guides readers toward deeper processing.

Complete sentence headings also draw on the dual coding principle, which holds that pairing words with visuals enhances learning more than text alone. Because each heading is placed near supporting figures and includes minimal extraneous text, readers can more effectively integrate verbal and visual information. This dual processing strengthens memory by engaging multiple cognitive pathways. In short, complete sentence headings work because they align poster design with how the human mind processes and remembers information.

Practical Tips for Adopting the Format

Successfully applying the complete sentence heading format requires researchers to consider the poster as a narrative whole. When read sequentially, the set of headings should tell a coherent research story, akin to the abstract of a paper. As one participant in our survey stated, “I like posters and presentations to tell a story.” The sentence headings should walk readers through the main outline of the story with the images and initial text in each section filling in the details.

Brevity in the headings is also critical. The longest sentence in any of the posters we tested was 21 words and most sentences were under 15 words. There should also be the right alignment between headings and visuals to allow readers to move seamlessly from summary to evidence.

Let’s Start Doing Better

Research posters should be more than academic advertisements—or, conversely, overwhelming data dumps that attempt to compress an entire journal article onto a single board. At their best, posters serve as tools for communicating a research story that is concise, complete and compelling.

The complete sentence heading format offers a simple but powerful shift in poster design. It blends the narrative clarity of a written abstract with the interpretive depth of figures, graphs and data. Just as importantly, it honors the reader’s time and cognitive capacity by aligning with what we know from cognitive science about how people process and retain information.

We can—and must—do better. Scientists invest significant effort in creating posters, and attendees devote valuable time trying to make sense of them. We owe it to ourselves, our colleagues and our students to design posters that do more than fill space in a conference hall. It’s time to move beyond outdated conventions and embrace formats that truly communicate science—clearly, efficiently and effectively.