Conference Abstracts: Is the work done?

Tomorrow I’m heading to the national American Chemical Society (ACS) conference. I try to attend one ACS conference per year and present some of the work in my research group. Sometimes I bring the undergraduates from my research lab (and they present posters of their work), other times I don’t. Since the national conference is large (this one will have ~14,000 attendees), conference abstracts are due five months ahead of time. Smaller conferences that I have attended require less lead-time.

Over the years, I have vacillated back and forth between whether to write the abstract on a research project that is nearly done or one that is in the early stages. In the former, there are plenty of results to show and it is easy to put the story together. Often, by the time the conference rolls around, I already have the complete story. Sometimes the peer-reviewed manuscript has been published by the time I talk about it. A lot can happen in five months.

Or very little could happen. Not in terms of work, but in terms of results. Five months ago, there were several projects I could highlight. (I usually submit just one abstract – I’ve never been turned away from giving a talk before.) This time I decided on the most ambitious project, and I had some preliminary data suggesting that things might work well when the time came around to present the work. This hasn’t happened yet – I don’t have a main punchline to the story although I have interesting “work in progress” results and analysis. I expect to be asking the audience for help in figuring out some of the issues although I broadly know what the problems are. Perhaps this is what conferences should be about – new, current, incomplete work, that the scientific community comes together to help solve. Certain smaller and more exclusive conferences that I’ve attended have such guidelines, but usually the larger national meeting is about showcasing work (for job seekers).

Interestingly one of the projects that I had conceived six months ago, but did not get started until three months ago, has yielded a slew of results and a nice story that I can write up soon. Sometimes things work well. This project was not the one I had written on my abstract, so I won’t be talking about it at the conference. (The undergraduate who worked on it will present it at the next ACS conference in March – the abstract will be due in the next 1-2 months and will be easy to write because we already know the results.)

I considered putting in a bunch of extra work right before the conference to see if I could make substantial headway in getting “results” but I decided against it. This will be one of the few times I won’t have a complete story, but instead I might have more audience participation and hear good suggestions to move the project forward. This should be what it means to be a community of learning!