Guidelines for Conference Materials

A group of colleagues working in the medical publications field just posted a preprint (not peer-reviewed) manuscript on Good Practice for Conference Abstracts and Presentations (GP-CAP). The paper works off of the GPP3 guidelines and ICMJE recommendations for developing and publishing manuscripts and tries to tackle some situations that are unique to conference materials and presentations.

Some of the distinguishing items that are discussed in GP-CAP are:

  • All authors should review and approve presentations/posters, but it may be impractical to expect all to make significant contributions to writing or editing an abstract because of the short length.
  • If the presentation is occurring in a location where the primary author is not proficient in the local language, there may be a need to have a different presenter who is not listed as an author.
  • How, when, and why to develop an encore presentation.
  • Author listing and sequence on posters and oral presentations should be the same as that on the abstract.
  • If research findings change substantially between the time of abstract submission and conference presentation and this change affects the conclusions of the research, authors should alert the conference to this discrepancy.

Though the GP-CAP guidelines have not been peer-reviewed yet, they constitute a solid and well-thought-out base from which to guide the development of abstracts, posters, and presentations.