Scientists at Conferences: Between Posters and Coffee Breaks

I spent the past few days at the ECER (European Conference on Educational Research). I was lucky this year—it was held in Belgrade. I had been to ECER before, and since it moves to a new city every year, each time it feels different. My first one was back in 2012 in Cádiz, then later I went to Copenhagen (I think in 2018). Somewhere in between I had planned to go to Glasgow, but my institute wouldn’t cover the costs. Then I was supposed to go to Edinburgh, but COVID happened. And after that, well, everything just stopped.

And now, finally, a conference again. To give you an idea of the scale: I talked to one of the organizers here in Belgrade, and she said there were more than 2,500 participants. At times more than 20 sessions were running in parallel. And all this stretched over four or five days. It immediately made me think of Sapolsky’s famous description of the Society for Neuroscience meetings:

“Like most scientists, I attend professional meetings every now and then, one of them being the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, an organization of most of the earth’s brain researchers. This is one of the more intellectually assaulting experiences you can imagine. About 28,000 of us science nerds jam into a single convention center. After a while, this togetherness can make you feel pretty nutty: for an entire week, go into any restaurant, elevator or bathroom, and the folks standing next to you will be having some animated discussion about squid axons. The process of finding out about the science itself is no easier. The meeting has 14,000 lectures and posters, a completely overwhelming amount of information. Of the subset of those posters that are essential for you to check, a bunch remain inaccessible because of the enthusiastic crowds in front of them, one turns out to be in a language you don’t even recognize, and another inevitably reports every experiment you planned to do for the next five years. Amid it all lurks the shared realization that despite zillions of us slaving away at the subject, we still know squat about how the brain works.

My own low point at the conference came one afternoon as I sat on the steps of the convention center, bludgeoned by information and a general sense of ignorance. My eyes focused on a stagnant, murky puddle of water by the curb, and I realized that some microscopic bug festering in there probably knew more about the brain than all of us neuroscientists combined.”(Sapolsky, “Bugs in the Brain”)

Of course, my conference wasn’t nearly as overwhelming. The crowd was smaller. But it was still big enough to make you feel like there were tens of thousands of people around. And yes, sometimes it wasn’t easy to push your way to the posters either.

I gave a talk (based on my research on migrants), attended a poster session, and listened to other presentations. Some were fascinating, others less so, but overall I realized how much I’d missed just being in that kind of space. Not even so much the actual discussions (though I missed those too), but simply the feeling of being in a place full of people who think in ways similar to yours and work on similar problems.

In the past, I never really liked conferences. I thought they were a waste of time—especially for introverts like me. But now, after two years without steady colleagues to talk to and without ongoing projects, I found it genuinely pleasant just to be there. I ran into a few former colleagues, some ex-students, even my former supervisor.

A few extra observations: my Serbian is still far from fluent, but my English has definitely gotten rusty. Even though I had carefully prepared and rehearsed my presentation, I still kept forgetting words mid-sentence.

And it made me think: what is the real purpose of conferences anyway, if we strip away the “networking” and the “reporting to funders”? How useful are they, really?

I came across a really interesting study on this: Kalle Hauss (2021), “What are the social and scientific benefits of participating at academic conferences? Insights from a survey among doctoral students and postdocs in Germany,” Research Evaluation, 30(1), 1–12.

The study used a mixed-methods design, starting with interviews of twelve young researchers across different fields, and then two large surveys covering almost 900 DAAD scholarship holders and a broader sample of PhDs and postdocs at German universities.

A few highlights stood out to me:

• Motivations & Expectations. Young researchers go to conferences not just to present work, but also to build networks, exchange methods, and signal their presence in the community.

• Collective and Individual Effects. Because conferences happen outside everyday structures like labs or faculties, they create indeterminate, weak-tie spaces where both collaborations and unexpected individual opportunities can emerge.

• Networking & Careers. Some participants used conferences quite strategically, with a portion reporting collaborations or even job offers that started from those encounters.

• Information Exchange. The most common benefits were very practical: methods, unpublished papers, tips on funding or jobs—especially for postdocs.

• Publications. Conferences even seeded publications: about one-fourth of doctoral students and almost 40% of postdocs said an international conference had led to a paper project.

The takeaway? Conferences may feel chaotic and exhausting, but they clearly matter—for visibility, for research, for building careers and networks. But not everyone sees them as equally transformative.

Another large-scale study, based on bibliometric analysis of more than 640,000 authors and 1 million papers from the DBLP database, came to a more skeptical conclusion. Osiek, Xexéo, Vivacqua & de Souza (2009), “Does Conference Participation Lead to Increased Collaboration? A Quantitative Investigation,” found that only about 4.6% of collaborations could plausibly be attributed to conference participation. In other words, while conferences certainly provide knowledge exchange and visibility, their impact on actually creating new long-term collaborations seems much smaller than we often imagine.

As for me, this conference turned out to be a great way to shake things up a bit, to remind myself that a “normal” academic life requires real interaction with other researchers. Reading papers and books is not enough—for developing both language skills and research ideas you need conversations, arguments, and that messy energy of being with others.

I didn’t build any collaborations this time (though I had the best of intentions—I even printed business cards to hand out, but in the end didn’t give out a single one 😊). Still, I had an interesting talk with my former supervisor, and maybe something will come out of that.

Ideas

It also struck me that conferences are a fantastic field site for those studying scientists themselves. I once wrote on my Telegram channel about Kevin Dunbar’s famous study, where he spent a year embedded in molecular biology labs to study scientific creativity. Something similar could be done with conferences: researchers could follow scientists around, observing how they talk, how they build networks, how they behave in discussions, and so on. To me, it looks like an endlessly fascinating place for research.

Paraphrasing the famous line from Casablanca: “This could be the beginning of a beautiful grant.”