Choosing a venue: conference or journal?

by Michael Ernst (mernst@cs.washington.edu)
December, 2006

Contents:

• Why to prefer a conference
• Why to prefer a journal
• Other resources

(Also see my advice on writing a technical paper, and a letter to USCIS making the point that in computer science, papers in peer-reviewed conferences are accepted as high-quality scholarly articles.)

(Note: This webpage is oriented toward computer scientists. The information is not necessarily accurate for other scientific fields.)

Should you publish your work in a conference or in a journal? Each is appropriate in certain circumstances. This webpage lays out some of the tradeoffs.

This information is accurate to the best of my knowledge, and it agrees with what all top researchers say. However, it is not intended to impugn any particular conference or journal — there are always exceptions to a rule.

Why to prefer a conference

In computer science, your preference should be for conference publication. Here are some reasons.

• Conferences have higher status. In part this is a historical artifact of the field of computer science, but it is self-perpetuating since that makes the best researchers want to send their papers to conferences rather than journals.
• Conferences provide higher visibility and greater impact. Many people will attend your talk, you will have the opportunity to answer questions, and people will talk to both you and to one another in the hallways. Even disregarding the event itself, more non-attendees read conference proceedings than read journals.
• Conferences have higher quality. Acceptance rates to good conferences are often around 10% (at least in software engineering, which is my field), whereas even the best journals are less selective. Naturally, there exist low-quality conferences (and journals), but if your c.v. is cluttered with them, then you will appear to be incapable of good work (even if the work you published in those venues really is good!), and your good publications will not stand out. A good rule of thumb is that the best conferences are sponsored by ACM.
• Conferences are more timely. It can take years for a journal publication to appear (or even for reviews to come back), whereas the turnaround time for conference reviews is a few months, and the proceedings also appear quickly.
• Conferences have higher standards of novelty. Journals often only require 20-30% of the material to be new, compared to an earlier conference version.

Why to prefer a journal

There are situations in which journal publication is desirable.

• Journals may have longer page limits. If you have too many experimental results to fit in a conference publication, then a journal affords an opportunity to include them. You can also include proofs that are too long (or boring) for a shorter publication. A journal paper could recap or given an overview of an entire research area.
• Journal reviews may be more detailed. Ideally, a journal reviewer will spend days on a paper, whereas a conference reviewer cannot afford to do so for each of the many papers he or she is assigned. Conference reviewers may believe the authors' claims (regarding a proof, for example), whereas journal reviewers are expected to verify them. Especially in certain fields, reviewers may expect that a paper will be submitted (or re-submitted) to a journal. In any event, if you get a longer review, that can help you to improve your work or to understand its shortcomings.
• Journals give the opportunity to revise your work and re-submit it for review. Actually, conferences give this too: if a paper is rejected from one conference, then you can revise based on the reviewers' comments and submit to a different conference, or the same one the next year.
• Journals have higher acceptance rates, giving the opportunity to get your research published. The same is true of workshops. These are particularly good venues for people who are just starting their research careers.
• Some lesser-ranked universities evaluate faculty on the basis of journal publications, because the Dean of Engineering is unable or unwilling to understand computer science. In most scientific fields, journals have higher standards than conferences; computer science is a rare exception. A top-ranked CS department can convince the dean to use the proper evaluation metric. A lower-ranked CS department cannot (the dean may think the department is trying to fool him or her). If you are at one of these universities, you will need to publish in journals, probably by submitting slightly revised versions of your conference papers to journals. The rush for people at lower-ranked universities (some of whom are excellent researchers, and some of whom are not) to submit even marginal results to journals is another regrettable factor that tends to lower the overall quality of journals.

The best papers at a conference are often solicited for expedited journal publication. I sometimes decline these opportunities, but your circumstances may be different. Whether you accept this invitation should be based on the factors above, such as whether there is value to the community of an expanded version of the paper, and how much more work it is to prepare the journal version. (For example, is there a thesis, technical report, or other document with additional material beyond the conference paper? Even better, are there additions that were suggested by reviewers or during discussions at the conference?)

The journal version of a publication will be cited more than the conference version, because the journal version has a later date and thus seems more authoritative. This is a good thing if the journal version adds real value (or corrects problems!). However, if you have cluttered the paper with a lot of details that aren't crucial (like extra tables of results, experiments that support your point slightly less strongly than the main ones, or discussions of tangential issues), then your paper may actually have less impact because readers will get mired in the irrelevant details. Good writing can avoid such problems.

Other resources

Regarding the impact of conferences vs. journals, see the CRA Best Practices Memo, Evaluating Computer Scientists and Engineers For Promotion and Tenure and Bertrand Meyer et al.'s CACM article Research Evaluation for Computer Science.

My biography indicates my qualifications to have an opinion on publication venues.

A Chinese translation of this webpage is available, thanks to Hao-Chuan Wang.

Back to Advice compiled by Michael Ernst.