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 your research. By disseminating research, scholars are able to share new insights and knowledge with their audience. Even the research you do for your classes are shared through submission for grading.
There are many different ways for researchers to disseminate their work. Sometimes scholars share their research findings by writing books or creating websites. Researchers are often asked to speak at meetings and sometimes they even contact the media to share new findings. But the 3 most common ways are known as the 3 P’s: Papers, Presentations, and Posters.
The most common way to disseminate your research is through publishing a research paper in a scholarly journal. Most faculty at universities are required to not only publish their research as part of their tenure requirements, but often their research must be published in academic journals with a high impact factor, which is 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 is a process where other experts in the field will review articles to be published to make sure they are high quality and represent good research and contributions to the field.
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.
A similar way to publish your research is through a conference paper. These are usually shorter and are presented or read at conferences and then are published in the conference proceedings. The acceptance process includes a peer review, as does the Q&A portion of the presentation at the conference.
Presenting at conferences is probably the most common way to share your research, and 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 which list the important points of your research, the data sets, findings, and major conclusions of your research. More importantly, your slides should include the verbal component of your 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 each slide usually takes around 1-2 minutes per slide, and to avoid just reading the slides, but instead highlighting the important points with easy to follow bullet points and graphics. So, for a 15 minute presentation, you should have 8-15 slides. The 10-20-30 rule is good to follow in general:
At conferences, another common way to share research is through posters. There will usually be a poster hall where the posters are displayed. There will often be times set apart at the conferences to browse the posters where the researchers will be available to ask questions. Poster sessions are also possible at virtual conferences. The posters will be displayed, with sessions where several presenters will talk about their posters with plenty of time for questions and answers.
Posters are slightly different from the other formats because all of their research information must be summarized into the poster format, and 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.
