Poster presenters: Send us your papers.

Abstract

Poster presentations have become a popular way for research psychologists to share current information. More than 1,500 posters were presented at the 1993 American Psychological Association (APA) convention, and 2,384 are scheduled for 1994. Poster presenters are expected to have completed papers and are asked to bring copies for distribution. Presenters customarily have a sign-up sheet for paper requests when supplies are depleted; providing the sign-up sheet implies a willingness to mail a copy of the paper. Violating this implied contract is a professional discourtesy that might occasionally occur because lists are misplaced, but that should not be routine. We have, over the years, requested a number of papers presented in poster sessions, many of which were not received; therefore, we decided to systematically examine responsiveness of poster presenters to requests for manuscripts.We requested manuscripts from poster presenters at the 1992 APA (August), American Psychological Society (APS; June), and Western Psychological Association (WPA; May) conventions. Because members of national professional organizations may have a stronger commitment to professional peers, we expected APA and APS members to be more responsive to manuscript requests.We requested all papers (N = 298) by fastening a selfsticking mailing label printed with the campus address of one of us to the posted sign-up sheet or by handing it to the poster presenter. Social contacts with the presenters were kept to a minimum to avoid influencing the response by establishing a social obligation beyond the normal professional obligation. In all, 108 requests were made at the APA convention, 79 were made at the APS convention, and 111 were made at the WPA convention. We attended poster sessions regularly throughout the meetings, generally near the end of their allotted time, and we requested copies of all papers that were not available and that had a sign-up sheet or researcher present. We did not request papers at Psi Chi sessions restricted to student researchers because we did not want to make requests that would be costly to students. After papers were received we recorded the postmark and kept the papers for our own interest or shared them with faculty colleagues. All papers received were postmarked within 126 days of the end of the relevant convention.

On Requesting Re-Prints Electronically

“…It can be seen that the average overall success rate is about 68%. (These data exclude (i) requests for copies of conference poster papers, which are sometimes but not always less successful [15,16], and (ii) anecdotal, as opposed to evidencebased, estimates [e.g. [17][18][19].…”

On requesting conference papers electronically

“…However, there is much less literature on this aspect of scientific communication. In fact I have only been able to trace two related studies here -both in the field of psychologyby Rienzi and Allen [6] and Mooney [7].…”

“…Rienzi and Allen [6] requested copies of 298 poster papers presented at the 1992 conventions of the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychological Society (APS), and the Western Psychological Association (WPA). In all three cases the method used was to leave a self-adhesive address label with a sign-up sheet, or to hand it to the poster presenters themselves at the three conferences.…”

Journal Reprints as Dissemination of Psychological Research: Courtesy, Obligation, or Obsolescence?

“…For example, responding to convention paper requests has been called a professional courtesy (Knight, 1987), a professional responsibility (Rienzi & Allen, 1994), and an unwarranted imposition (Olbrisch, 1995). Thus, there may be some confusion concerning authors' responsibility for providing reprints.…”

“…Using a larger sample, Searleman, Morris, Becker, and Makosky (1983) achieved an 81 % return rate that was not biased by either gender or academic rank. Worse noncompliance problems (51 %) have been encountered when requesting papers presented at profcssional conferences (Knight, 1987;Rienzi & Allen, 1994).…”