Author‐based analysis of conference versus journal publication in computer science

Abstract

Conference publications in computer science (CS) have attracted scholarly attention due to their unique status as a main research outlet, unlike other science fields where journals are dominantly used for communicating research findings. One frequent research question has been how different conference and journal publications are, considering an article as a unit of analysis. This study takes an author‐based approach to analyze the publishing patterns of 517,763 scholars who have ever published both in CS conferences and journals for the last 57 years, as recorded in DBLP. The analysis shows that the majority of CS scholars tend to make their scholarly debut, publish more articles, and collaborate with more coauthors in conferences than in journals. Importantly, conference articles seem to serve as a distinct channel of scholarly communication, not a mere preceding step to journal publications: coauthors and title words of authors across conferences and journals tend not to overlap much. This study corroborates findings of previous studies on this topic from a distinctive perspective and suggests that conference authorship in CS calls for more special attention from scholars and administrators outside CS who have focused on journal publications to mine authorship data and evaluate scholarly performance.

Adoption of the Open Access Business Model in Scientific Journal Publishing: A Cross-disciplinary Study

“…In many engineering disciplines and in computer science, publishing in conference proceedings is almost as important as publishing in journals 34 , 35 . This assertion is supported by a typically high valuation of conference contributions in researcher evaluations.…”

A bibliometric study of human–computer interaction research activity in the Nordic-Baltic Eight countries

“…Franceschet concluded by recommending publishing fewer more mature works in journals compared to incremental works in conferences. Although reporting similar observations, Kim (2019) argues that fields outside computer science need to acknowledge the publication patterns within computer science. In a study of nearly 50,000 conference papers, Lee (2019) found that impact was linked to conference longevity, proceedings with few papers, low acceptance rates, broad scope, papers by authors from different countries, and papers presented during the months January through June and August.…”

Author-related factors predicting citation counts of conference papers: focusing on computer and information science

“…However, results of this study confirm that characteristics of all authors who were more experienced and established than first authors tend to determine the research impact of their conference papers. The marginal predictive effect of less experienced first authors seems to link to the disciplinary culture of computer science and information science that young researchers tend to publish their first papers at conferences (Kim, 2019).…”