Here are a few guidelines regarding what can or should be represented in the various sections of your Common Application Form (CAF).....
[*]If you gave a (poster or oral) presentation at a conference, and the abstract corresponding to your presentation was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal (e.g., abstracts from the
Annual Scientific Meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism), then you can list in more than one category: (a) peer reviewed journal abstracts, and (b) (poster or oral) presentations.
I take some reservation with what is written above. I feel that you should probably just put them in as just presentations, unless you have a small number of presentations (like 4 or less) and all have corresponding abstracts that match up nicely when viewed in the application. These abstracts aren't really peer-reviewed even if they appear in a "peer-reviewed journal," some PG may assume you're padding your CV, and if you have other articles that the abstracts would get lumped up in with it may distract the reader from your big-time article's entry.
On my CV, I have 1 peer-reviewed journal article, 9 posters (seven of which have published abstracts in well established journals), 3 oral presentations (two of which have published abstracts). In my personal CV (not the ERAS one) I list the presentations that have corresponding abstracts in this fashion:
Smith JA, Rules MD, Schmo, JD. Interesting Complicated Talk About Stuff. Movement Disorders. 53(Suppl 9):S578, Jun 2004. Presented at the 14th International Congress on Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders, Rome, Italy, June 1-4, 2004.
However, you can't do that on ERAS,
(although maybe AAMC will read this post and change the entry format). I tried putting everything in both sections where applicable, but it looks very busy and padded and in a way distracts from the one peer-reviewed article I wrote (as first author in a high IF journal - oh wait nobody cares
). I found it worked best to put the one article under the "Peer Review Journal Articles/Abstracts" heading, all the posters under the "Poster Presentations", and all the orals as "Oral Presentations". Sure, I don't get "credit" for having published a corresponding abstract for those presentation, but the numbers work out right, I most accurately convey my credits, and PG's in your field will recognize the big meetings and usually know that the abstracts exists.
Also I wholly disagree with those who said to only put posters/orals for those you actually presented. The reference is not for "presenting," it is for "authorship." If you contributed enough work to the poster or oral presentation to be credited as an author then you put it on your CV, nuff said.