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Typically, for PhD students who are in their third or fourth year, is it worth pursuing poster submissions at relevant conferences?
Obviously this is a somewhat subjective quantity, but is it generally considered appropriate for researchers who are not new to their field to pursue such publications, and do they realistically have standing, relative to, let's say, short papers?
I'm in the social and health sciences and do not know what field you are in, so this may be discipline specific. However, it is appropriate for advanced PhD students to give poster presentations. As a PhD student, you are considered a junior scholar (as you would also be considered as an pre-tenured assistant professor) and poster sessions are appropriate at this stage of your career. However, if publishing papers is more desirable than presentations in your field, it is advised that you spend more time working on getting your papers in print than presenting them at conferences. I know of academics who did not receive tenure, because they presented papers at a ton of conferences, but never submitted the papers for publication. Posters have great purposes, but may be less likely to turn into a paper.
Poster presentation are useful for all scholars: PhD's, postdocs and even professors. I think it's worth to be explicit as to why we do the things the way we do in academia - rarely you can find a colleague or supervisor explaining the reasons behind academia quirky mechanisms. Posters, Conference presentations, journal publications are all means of disseminating your academic work. Posters typically pass very quick scrutiny and reach typically a dozen people or so, conference presentations a bit more scrutiny and reach up to hundreds of people - especially if they get published proceedings - and journal publications have to pass the full peer-review process and have the potential to reach thousands of people. That is why posters are "worth" less than conference presentation, that in turn are "worth" less than journal publications. That being said, a poster can be a way to disseminate results of an already published paper, so the boundaries are subtle. All in all, a poster is an excellent way to discuss with other specialists your either preliminary or already concluded piece of work.
