The State of Scientific Poster Sharing and Reuse

2026-04-22

AI Summary

Scientific posters, as vital vehicles for scholarly communication, have long suffered from low sharing rates, the absence of persistent identifiers, incomplete metadata, and a lack of established citation practices, all of which hinder their discoverability and reuse. This study presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of 86 global poster-sharing platforms, integrating platform surveys, metadata assessments, and usage metrics—including views, downloads, and citations—with a focus on major repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare. As of 2024, only approximately 150,000 posters are publicly shared, with most platforms failing to adhere to FAIR principles, exhibiting critical gaps in conference-related metadata and extremely low citation rates. The findings reveal a disconnect between platform capabilities and user behaviors, prompting the proposal of community guidelines to standardize poster sharing and reuse.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices

Abstract

Scientific posters are one of the most common forms of scholarly communication and contain early-stage insights with potential to accelerate scientific discovery. We investigated where posters are shared, to what extent their sharing aligns with the FAIR principles, and how commonly they are reused. We identified 86 platforms hosting posters, with many not assigning persistent identifiers. A total of 150k posters are shared as of 2024 on the 43 platforms where we were able to count, which is relatively low. Looking in more detail at posters shared on Zenodo and Figshare, we found that repositories are not always supporting structured metadata critical for poster discovery, like conference information, and that researchers are not providing such metadata even if they are supported. We also observed that while there is some engagement with posters in terms of views and downloads, citing posters is not yet a common practice. Our recommendations are for the scientific community to encourage poster sharing and reuse and establish clear guidelines to make posters FAIR.

Problem

• scientific posters
• FAIR principles
• metadata
• reuse
• persistent identifiers

Innovation

• scientific posters
• FAIR principles
• metadata
• research reuse
• scholarly communication