Hi, I have a dilemma.

I want to submit a Poster for a conference that will be held in March next year. I must submit an abstract addressing the headings, objectives, methods, results and conclusions. The abstract must be submitted next week. The problem is I have no “actual” results yet. I have just entered by second year of my PhD. I have completed a literature review. I hope to have results by February next year. Any suggestions how I could write an abstract without any results?

A.
:-)

Hey Anna! This shouldn't be a barrier to getting a poster accepted. Firstly, do you have to present results at all? Some people design posters based on a completed literature review or on research that is going to be conducted but hasn't been completed yet. If you want to present actual results and you know you will have some on time then it's okay to be pretty vague in the results section- many people at conferences have to submit their abstracts six months or more prior to the conference so a lot of people write very vague statements about the results because they have an idea of what the results might be but don't have the full data set yet. And even if you were to put some suggested/expected results in your abstract then it wouldn't really matter if they had changed by the time you presented your poster- I did an oral presentation at a conference just last week where my results had changed quite significantly since I submitted the abstract (in March, when I only had about 3 data sets to go off!!) and lots of other people were in the same boat. So don't worry about it- you can talk about expected results, or just talk about the data that you are going to present- it shouldn't be a big problem! Good luck, KB

Anna10 - fear not I was in exactly the same position a month ago. I have since had a poster accepted based on an abstract from a literature review. My supervisor was great in helping with the abstract and has given me several examples of posters which have clarified in my mind what is required.
I spoke to the conference organiser on the phone as well who was also very helpful.