4 ms·
Conference proceedings (not to be confused with a handful of actual journals that just contain "proceedings" in their name) can be thought of like the paper pro
by beloch 13y ago
Conference proceedings (not to be confused with a handful of actual journals that just contain "proceedings" in their name) can be thought of like the paper programs you might be handed at a play. They're usually meant to be an accompaniment to the event rather than a stand-alone publication. Their intent is to collect contributions from conference participants into a handy reference that attendees can use if they want more information, missed a talk they were interested in, etc.. Extremely high quality proceedings are peer-reviewed and might eventually evolve into a text-book. This level of quality is relatively rare though.
Most conference proceedings are not peer-reviewed and many aren't even read once by the conference organizers/"editors". This usually isn't thought to be a big deal because it is assumed that, were a submission truly fraudulent, the submitter would inevitably be outed when they give their talk. However, some conferences make submitting an original paper for their proceedings mandatory for acceptance. Getting funding to attend a conference is usually a lot easier if you're presenting, so researchers are motivated to speak even if they merely wish to attend. Speaking looks better on your CV to boot. Since conference proceedings are typically ignored, researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers. When dead trees ruled, conference proceedings would be rapidly forgotten simply because you'd have a deuce of a time finding them if you somehow heard about a paper in it that you wanted to read! They simply weren't distributed to anyone besides conference attendees and maybe a library or two. Today, electronic copies have brought poor quality conference proceedings to a far vaster audience than they were ever intended for!
I'm disappointed, but not the least bit surprised that some people would submit something created by a paper generator to a conference. The blame for this falls squarely on conference organizers for requiring paper submissions but being too lazy to even read them once. If you don't want to read a stack of badly written papers, require abstracts only and, if you're still gung-ho to make some proceedings, welcome voluntary paper submissions.
This incident should not shake confidence in peer-reviewed journals one iota. It might, however, discourage conference organizers from requiring papers from speakers if they're not committed to reading them all.
- hueving 13y ago>Since conference proceedings are typically ignored researchers generally won't put their best effort into these papers. It's interesting, because this is completely the opposite in many CS fields (e.g. security). The top conferences carry much more weight than any journal. It's probably related to how fast the field changes.
- beloch 13y agoI'm not in CS, but I've heard of this. It's definitely aberrant. Some other fields change just as rapidly so I'd just chalk this up as a cultural difference.
- mzl 13y agoIn many CS fields, workshops are the equivalent of conferences in other fields such as physics. It is important to judge each field on how the primary peer-review publication is done, not by some abstract rule that is supposed to be the only valid standard. As a side note, I've heard people from the humanities scoff at physicists and their belief that journal papers are worth mentioning. The only real publications are books.
- p4bl0 13y agoActually, there are workshops in many CS fields which are selective (not as much as big conferences, that's for sure) and as serious as conferences or journal on peer-reviewing. The name "workshop" mainly means that the focus of the event is very specific and that the attendance is intended to be small so that real discussion with everyone can happen (contrary to big conferences where there are hundreds of people). For example my last published paper was submitted to a workshop [1] and I had four different detailed reviews, which had nothing to envy to big conferences reviews I could have got for it. This is an example of a not very selective (because it has little submissions) workshop but which is very serious and would most certainly reject any computer generated paper. Another example could be CHES [2] which is a workshop which grew big and is now the most prestigious conference (again, that means more prestigious than journals as in most CS fields) of its field (crypto hardware/side-channel security). In this case the name "workshop" sticks, but it is actually a full-fledged conference. Yet another example of a small workshop [3] (still in the same field) which does serious peer reviewing (I had three looong and detailed reviews when I submitted my paper there). Last year they selected 8 papers for presentation the day of the workshop, and 4 of them were selected by a journal [4] for subsequent publication of an extended version (and after another small round of reviews since there were already the reviews of the workshop which were deemed serious enough by the journal's editors). Maybe this is particular to the field of security (could it be due to the hacker subculture background it has in addition to its academic background?), but I guess my point is that it is not possible to generalize how the publication system works for all sciences, let alone for all academic research. [1] http://pprew.org/ http://pprew.org/ [2] http://www.chesworkshop.org/ http://www.chesworkshop.org/ [3] http://www.proofs-workshop.org/ http://www.proofs-workshop.org/ [4] http://link.springer.com/journal/13389 http://link.springer.com/journal/13389