Some thoughts on oral presentations

The Systematics 2017 conference in Adelaide was great, and as always I learned a great deal and enjoyed interacting with colleagues. Also this was simply the first time since I came to Australia that I saw South Australia, and it was the last state that I had not seen so far.

Looking back over the talks (oral presentations) I heard over those three days I wonder, however, about the different aspects that people decide to focus on in those talks. There are five types of talks that I find particularly odd.

The overly introduction focused talk

The average conference talk in science is structured like the average scientific paper: (1) introduction providing background information and leading into the aims of the study, (2) methods, (3) results, and (4) a discussion putting the results into context and explaining what they mean. What I call the introduction focused talk is when the speaker spends so much time telling us how cool their study group is and what had already been known about it decades ago or perhaps what they are trying to achieve that by the ten minute mark I wonder if we will ever get to hear what they have actually found out.

Now this is of course perfectly fine if the speaker is a first year graduate student who has only just started their project, but it is somewhat less understandable if a more senior researcher actually has lots of interesting data but, due to their misplaced sense of priorities, only manages to flash one tantalising results slide for twenty seconds before their talk is cut off by the session chair. In such cases something is off about the balance of the talk, just saying.

Relentless wet lab wonkery

One of the frustrations of the last few years, clearly driven by the rise in high-throughput sequencing, is the increasing amount of lab method wonkery in conference talks. People who could otherwise be great and engaging speakers go through slide after slide with little lines that are meant to be DNA fragments, explaining at length how those fragments are produced, barcoded, amplified, size selected, pooled, and sequenced, often for approaches that have been around for several years.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think most people do no want to hear, at least primarily, what somebody did on the bench, they want to hear for example how the study plants or animals evolved and what that means biologically. The lab wonk talk is like going shopping for a used car and finding that every salesman first walks you through the way a combustion engine works.

Relentless bioinformatics wonkery

This is the same as the previous, only with a focus on how the sequence reads are quality controlled, contigs are built, alignments are made, etc. Except in the context of a methods workshop it is perhaps even less helpful than lab wonkery. Most biologists in the field can at least easily visualise what happens to the DNA fragments the lab wonk is talking about (even if they don't really care and want to see the biologically meaningful results), but the bioinformatics realm is so full of impenetrable jargon that ironically only those who don't need to hear the talk will be able to understand it anyway.

Selling well known facts as great new insights

Another frustration that I have are those speakers who present as their awesome new insight something that every marginally competent audience member has been aware of for years.

High-throughput sequencing gives us more data than Sanger sequencing did? Who knew? So, museum specimens have degraded DNA? You don't say. GBIF exists, and the public can download specimen location data from it? Wow. We should be taking photos of herbarium specimens and putting them into online databases? Quick, somebody invent JSTOR Plants!

I am not saying that these are not points that can be made as part of the introduction to one's topic, to show how far we have come in a very short time. But if the entire point of the talk is something to the effect of "future directions in our field" or "where we need to be in 2028" one does expect something that did not already happen a decade or so ago.

The self-promoting and frustratingly off-topic keynote

Finally, I am starting to notice a certain type of keynote or plenary talk, where a hotshot scientist is invited to provide a broad overview of developments in their field, usually to frame the more focused and detailed talks that will follow after it in the program.

Keynotes and plenaries are always more like review articles than research articles, and I just have to admit that I do not go to conferences primarily to hear them. Nonetheless I have heard great and engaging plenaries, including at this recent conference, and can enjoy some of them even when they are largely about historical developments. It just depends on the choices made by the speaker.

What I really find frustrating are speakers who see these talks largely as opportunities for self-promotion. Their talks show at least several of the following features:

• Nearly everything that is mentioned is the speaker's own work and that of their students, virtually ignoring contributions from others in the field.
  
• Accordingly, many of the images in the slides appear to be photos of their numerous students and postdocs, usually goofing around in the field or looking awkward in front of a computer screen.
• A good part of the remaining images are scans of the tops of the speaker's own articles, with the journal name showing prominently ("look, I have a Nature paper!").
• The content of the talk is at best tangential to the title that it was advertised under, presumably because the speaker is re-using the same slides as for the last four such talks they gave under different titles and on different occasions.

Of course I would not expect everybody to agree with me, but my favourite type of talk is still a standard contributed presentation that is well-balanced between background and results, with methodology largely limited to a few informative bullet points.