The computer science practice you describe is the exception, not the norm. It causes a lot of trouble when evaluating the merits of researchers, because most pe

The computer science practice you describe is the exception, not the norm. It causes a lot of trouble when evaluating the merits of researchers, because most people in the academia are not familiar with it. In many places, conference papers don't even count as real publications, putting CS researchers at a disadvantage. From my point of view, the biggest issue is accepting/rejecting papers based on first impressions. Because there is often only one round of reviews, you can't ask the authors for clarifications, and they can't try to fix the issues you have identified. Conferences tend to follow fashionable topics, and they are often narrower in scope than what they claim to be, because it's easier to evaluate papers on topics the program committee is familiar with. The work done by the program committee was not even supposed to be proper peer review but only the first filter. Old conference papers often call themselves extended abstracts, and they don't contain all the details you would expect in the full paper. For example, a theoretical paper may omit key proofs. Once the program committee has determined that the results look interesting and plausible and the authors have presented them in a conference, the authors are supposed to write the full paper and submit it to a journal for peer review. Of course, this doesn't always happen, for a number of reasons.