Listing conference presentations on CV - stop or continue?

October 17, 2018 11:53 AM

Mid-career scientists, do you still list conference posters and talks on your CV? Is the answer different if you're looking for a job that is less focused on research?

I'm at the point where I've directed enough research that I'm on posters that I didn't present myself. Sometimes I've presented at a conference and had a couple of my students presenting posters at the same conference. My name is on all of these, and it seems like overkill to include everything on my CV. Should I re-organize them under the conference name, take them off, etc.?

Does this vary if you are in academia vs. government vs. industry? Thanks!

posted by Knowyournuts to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Talks, yes.

Posters, it depends. I have a section of "Recent Abstracts" on a longer-form version of my CV that only goes back a few years. You could also do something like

Smith, Cooper and Knowyounuts (2018). Poster Title Goes Here. Society for AskMe Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2018 (+ 2 additional posters from my group).

for each conference, which would shorten that section.

Or just put the whole list at the end of your CV, where only the diehards will dive that deep.
posted by Dashy at 12:07 PM on October 17, 2018

Mid-career academic here. I only list invited talks that I give myself.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:16 PM on October 17, 2018

I’ve been putting “selected presentations”
on my CV ever since I got my PhD, almost 10 years ago.

That used to mean 90% of all talks and posters I could lay claim to, now it means some small handful of what I think is most interesting and I’m most proud of.

I have a generic version, but if I’m sending a CV to someplace or <someone specifically, I customize it to the context, and that may mean including more, less, or different presentations. I’ve only worked in academia so far, I’d probably add more volume if I were aiming for some govt. or NGO work.
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:16 PM on October 17, 2018

I would say keep listing them so you HAVE them. I keep a CV that I call "full CV" that lists every stupid thing ever. That's the one I update. Then when I need a CV for some purpose I delete all the stuff that I don't think needs to be there. In Full CV I have a lot of sections highlighted for easy deletion...stuff I can't imagine ever wanting to keep. I start by deleting the highlighted stuff and then scan through for things not appropriate to the CVs current purpose. But it's all there because if I delete it and somehow I need to know the name of some scholarship I was as an undergrad or what the class was where I guest lectured, or whatever, I'll have it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 12:25 PM on October 17, 2018 [15 favorites]

I'm with If only I had a penguin...: everything you've done belongs on your full CV. To some degree, that's the point of a CV.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 12:28 PM on October 17, 2018

I think it will depend a lot on your field. I'd ask some senior people who do very nearly the same thing you do and who have been on hiring committees before.

In my specific physical-sciences field, for a faculty-equivalent positions at research-focused academic/national-lab institutions, listing contributed talks or posters would be notably unusual and might catch the reader's eye in a bad way. Listing invited talks isn't weird. (For a postdoc or similar job, listing contributed talks is a lot more common and unlikely to offend, but I'm not sure it's worth much, especially when also listing the proceedings from a subset of those talks.)
posted by eotvos at 1:16 PM on October 17, 2018

After all conferences got to around two pages, I cut it to international conferences only. Then when that got too long, I started only listing invited talks.
posted by lollusc at 1:51 PM on October 17, 2018

I do like others - my CV is in LaTeX and it has everything, and then I comment out all of the things that I don't think are relevant. For most purposes I'd comment out posters, or only include "selected" ones, but having them on the full version means that if for some reason I'm in a situation where sheer length of the CV matters, it's trivial to put them all in.
posted by forza at 2:57 PM on October 17, 2018

I agree with keeping it all on your Full CV and then deleting what's irrelevant for the particular purpose. In fact, keeping track presentations given by your students may come in handy if your funding agency starts asking for that information as evidence of your supervisory effectiveness.
posted by heatherlogan at 5:01 PM on October 17, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I definitely am keeping a long form CV. I might go with either “Selected” or the grouping-by-conference method. But then there’s the awkward instance of my taking the same poster to two immediately back-to-back conferences. It’s feeling a bit juvenile to list every poster that ever had my name on it, and sometimes the titles are so close they appear to repeat. Good point about how it shows that I support students, though. I’m job hunting right now and not sure whether I’ll stay in academia. If so, supporting students is a top priority. But I think showing productivity is good all around. I don’t suppose anyone has ever just listed ‘conferences presented at’ and omitted titles for brevity? For a job that doesn’t specify a field of research?
posted by Knowyournuts at 8:30 PM on October 17, 2018