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. It’s very rare to conduct research without sharing the results for the wider scholarly community to learn from it. Even the research you do for your classes at university are shared through submission for grading. There are many different ways for researchers to disseminate their work, however. Here are some of the more common methods:
The most common way to disseminate your research is through a research paper published as an article in a 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 relevance prestige of a journal in it’s field by how often articles published in the journal are cited in other research. Most academic journals are also 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 is 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 other most common way to share your research, and oftentimes a presentation at a conference will later become a formal article published in a journal later. Presentations are for specific amounts of time (usually something like 20 or 50 minutes) depending on the format of the conference.
Good presentations can include a slide deck which lists the important points of your research, the data sets, findings, and major conclusions of your research, but more importantly will 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. For more details on how to prepare good presentation slides, see the Microsoft 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint.
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.