Disseminating Your Research
After you have completed your research, repeating the steps in the process as many times as necessary, the final step is to disseminate (share or circulate) your research. By disseminating research, scholars can share new insights and knowledge with their audience. While dissemination typically means sharing it with more than one person, submitting your research to your professor is a basic form of dissemination.
Researchers have various ways to disseminate their work. Sometimes scholars share their research findings by writing books, or creating websites with information about their work. Researchers speak about their work at conferences, and sometimes they even contact the media to share their new research findings. The three most common ways are known as the 3 P’s: Posters, Presentations, and Papers.
A common way college students and scholars share their research at conferences is with posters. They compile their research questions, methodology, research findings, and citations into a large, visually appealing poster. At in-person conferences, there are large halls where the posters are displayed with “poster sessions” built into the conference agenda: a time when conference attendees can walk through the hall. The owners of each poster usually stand next to their poster to explain their research and to answer questions. Researchers use catchy titles and interesting graphics to draw people to your poster.
Poster sessions are also possible at virtual conferences. The posters are displayed electronically, with sessions where several presenters will discuss their posters with plenty of time for questions and answers.
Posters differ slightly from other formats because all of the research information must be summarized into the poster format. While these posters are large, the information must be presentable and easy to understand. There are many good academic poster templates online, such as Canva.com, posternerd.com, or Adobe.com. Here is an example of Yale University’s guidelines for posters.
"Office of Research and Development - ORD PosterSession," Public Domain, [The U.S. National Archives] accessed April 10, 2025.
Presenting at conferences is a very popular way for scholars to disseminate their research. Oftentimes, a presentation at a conference will be published later as an article. Presentations are for specific amounts of time (usually something like 20 or 50 minutes), depending on the format of the conference.
Good presentations include slides that list the important points of research, such as the research questions, the methodology, the findings, and major conclusions. More importantly, you narrate your slides in a presentation where you give the details and narrative about your topic and research.
Generally, when making slide decks for your presentation, it is important to remember that narrating each slide usually takes around 1-2 minutes per slide. Avoid just reading the slides, but instead highlighting the important points with easy-to-follow bullet points and graphics. So, for a 5-7 minute presentation, you should have 3-7 slides.
Another way that scholars disseminate their research is by publishing a research paper in a scholarly journal. Most faculty (professors) at universities are required to publish their research as part of their requirements to get a permanent position with the university (tenure). Often their research must be published in prestigious academic journals which have a high impact factor. Impact factors are a way to measure the prestige of a journal in its field by how often articles published in the journal are cited in other research. Most academic journals are peer-reviewed, which generally ensures that they are high quality and represent sound research and contributions to the field of study. Being published in a journal with a high impact factor lends prestige and authority to the article and its author(s).
When publishing an article, the formatting of the paper may be even more stringent than your college papers, especially since most journals will have their own formatting requirements. This is why it is good to have a good knowledge of how citation styles and formatting works in general.
Conference papers are typically shorter than scholarly articles and they are presented or read at conferences and published in the conference proceedings (publication that bundles all conference papers together). The acceptance process includes a peer review but is generally less stringent than the review for scholarly articles.
