Is it worth doing a poster presentation?

Question

I submitted a paper to an IEEE conference (Computer Science). My paper was not accepted for publication but it has been accepted for poster presentation there.

The conference requires the authors to pay full delegate registration fees as is required for authors of published works. Is it a common practice ?

I was a novice student in the field when I submitted the paper, but have worked a lot in past few months in the area. And I am not looking for any specific inputs into that work anymore.

Is it worth doing a poster presentation in such case ?

EDIT: (some additional information)

• It is not a top tier conference
• I am self funded

Answer 1

I have some experience publishing in CS, so I'll give you my point of view.

The conference requires the authors to pay full delegate registration fees as is required for authors of published works. Is it a common practice ?

Yes. In general, every participant is expected to pay in full, no matter what kind of contribution he/she has submitted. You are paying the conference, not your publication. One could argue that this is the main point why many (weaker) conferences even have poster and short paper tracks - to get more people to pay full registrations and attend the conference without having to accept too many papers.

I was a novice student in the field when I submitted the paper, but have worked a lot in past few months in the area. And I am not looking for any specific inputs into that work anymore.

I should comment that this is a somewhat questionable attitude. Even if you are not planning to continue a certain line of research, hearing what others think about your work will help you a lot in future research projects and papers. Also, I don't think that you can go from novice to can't learn anything in the field anymore in the timeframe of a conference paper review process, so I'll wager that some in the audience will still have reasonable input on your work.

Is it worth doing a poster presentation in such case ?

I would say this depends on practicalities. Is your advisor OK with paying your conference trip without a full paper to show? Is it far, will the travel be expensive? Is it a top conference that you want to attend for the conference's (and associated networking's) sake? Have you done many presentations, or will it at least be good training?

That being said, from a scientific point of view, most poster presentations are not very valuable. They don't count a lot on your CV (except, maybe, if it really is an absolute top conference), and you will not get that much feedback, realistically.

Answer 2

I have very mixed feelings about poster presentations. Here is my take on this.

Pros of poster presentations:

• You get to meet people. Sometimes (very rarely, IMO), the people that you meet through your poster session help you quite a bit through your career; invitations to seminars, eventually hiring you as their postdocs, etc.
• It's one more line on your CV. Always helpful.
• If you were going to go to that conference anyway, it's something productive.

Cons:

• In all honesty, what will happen most of the time is that you will be standing in front of your poster (quite awkward experience, I might add), and no one will be really interested; they might ask you a question or two, but then they will want to move on to the next poster.
• It's a lot of time and effort spent on making that poster. Also, poster printing is expensive.
• In many fields, poster presentations on CVs are not taken super seriously.

As far as I am concerned, poster presentations are something to do while you are away at a conference. I personally usually opt not to present poster, because the outcome to effort ratio is quite low. As a rule of thumb, I would recommend that you present the poster if you are a graduate student of early years (if you have spoken in very few conferences), and be more selective if you are more senior in academia. For example, you might choose to present your poster if the conference is very prestigious, or if you know that someone that you would really like to know is coming to that conference. Otherwise, it doesn't make a huge difference in my opinion.

Answer 3

Have you done these kinds of presentations before? If not, it may be good practice if you are a shy public speaker and could use the practice. Also, if you are interested in meeting the other people at the conference, it would be useful to go.