Coverage and appreciation of conferences

Despite their widespread and established existence, there is scant literary interest in academic conferences. Gross and Fleming (2011, p.153) note that no books had been published on the subject prior to 2011. Since then, books have started to appear which address conferences as an academic topic, and have begun to redress the observation of Breiter and Milman (2006) that most conference studies have been conducted from a meeting planners perspective, and that no specified user group studies have been conducted. Beyond the meetings industry literature, Segar (2015) examines the concepts of peer-connection at conferences to enhance learning and engagement; Pereira (2017) discusses conference practices in terms of feminist scholarship; Rowe (2017a) addresses the place and efficacy of conference poster presentation; Nicolson (2017) looks at conferences as neoliberal commodities;

Edwards, Foley, & Malone (2017) show how conferences can have value as drivers of social change, in terms of the outcomes of chance encounters, networking and collaboration; and Høyer Leivestad and Nyqvist (2017) explore networking and other social processes at large-scale professional gatherings. [Author note: 2017 appears to have been a highly unusual year in terms of the number of conference-related works published.]

However, there is no specific coverage of ASP conferences as an educational focus in published literature series (i.e. academic journals). Illustrating this, a serial search of the Finnish Publication Forum (2018) for ‘conference’ oriented publications yields a total of 416 results (see Appendix 2). When implementing the Web of Science search domain of ‘Education & Educational Research’ and the Scopus domain of ‘Education’ as limiters, 197 series titles were returned, but none looked at conferences as an educational study area. A number of publications carry

‘conference(s)’ as a word in their title, however these are mainly publications and proceedings that result from conferences, and none address conferences as a specific topic. Furthermore, a wide range of journals are returned that are journals of a particular field (e.g. the 197 publications falling under education and educational research), but which have no relation to conferences as a study topic. As a result, a full range of ratings may be seen (Level 0-3), but these do not reflect what is available in reference to the specified search focus. As outlined in the Introduction to this thesis, conferences are mainly studied as events produced by the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) industry, and their study has been mainly restricted to a meetings industry perspective (Breiter & Milman, 2006).

However, in the Finnish Publication Forum, none of the publication channels within the event management and tourism literature is ranked higher than Level 1, aside from the Annals of Tourism Research (3), Tourism Geographies (2) and Tourism Management (2). Thus, according to the grading of the Finnish Publication Forum, over 95% of the MICE literature is evaluated as being only of an ungraded or basic level.

As an international comparison, the Australian Business Deans Council (2018) publishes a master journal list, ranking journals as A* (top), A, B, C. When searching the 2,777 listed journals for ‘conference’ as a key word, only six journals are returned (3 at level B and 3 at level C). The Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science (2018) ranks publications as ordinary channels at level 1, particularly distinguished channels at level 2 and excellent and most prestigious channels at level 3. When searching the 20,616 listed journals for ‘conference’ as a key word, a wide range of conference proceedings are listed. Similar to the Finnish Publication Forum (2018) high levels of returns are seen from the fields of engineering, computer science and information science, although conference series are featured across disciplines and topics. However, whilst there are various series rated at level 2 (nearly all from the fields of engineering, computer science and information science), the vast majority are ranked at the ordinary level 1. On an international scale, 155,704 conference proceedings are listed on the Web of Science database (KTH 2015), and 118,547 conference proceedings are listed in the Scopus (2018) database as bibliometric sources. Differences between disciplines exist in regard to the meaningful interpretation of citation rates and assigned impact factors of publications (e.g.

Radicchi, Fortunato, & Castellano 2008; Vaughan, Tang, & Yang 2017), and both

the Web of Science and Scopus databases have been seen to introduce biases that favour Natural Sciences, Engineering, and Biomedical Research, to the detriment of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities (Mongeon & Paul-Hus 2016). As such (and in-line with the recommendations of Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016), national and discipline-specific citation and publication indices are perhaps a more representative way of evaluating the appreciation of conference proceedings as a publication channel.

Conferences are clearly used as a medium of scholarly communication, however their function as a publication channel is debated. Conference presentations (e.g.

oral and poster presentations, together with published papers) have been considered as ‘outputs’, yet from an early time they have been noted to be poorly reported (UNESCO, 1963). To examine the value attribution scholars give conferences as a publication channel, in 2017, the Finnish Publication Forum was seen to have removed 3,165 conferences from their database, and although they state that published conference outputs will be taken into account in the university funding model, they will be graded at the level of their publication channel (e.g. the series or book publisher, determined by ISSN/ISBN) (Finnish Publication Forum, 2017).

Thus, the level of appreciation would seem to reflect the reputation of the publishing house, and not the esteem of either the conference event or the author’s work. Of the conferences remaining on the forum, none are identified at Level 3 (top), only 6 (0.19%) are identified at Level 2 (leading), 935 (29%) are identified as Level 1 (basic), and 128 (4%) are acknowledged at Level 0. The remaining 2,102 event publications (66%) are ungraded. Thus, the Finnish Publication Forum grading system seems to extend a very low level of appreciation or recognition to conference outputs as scholarly publications, despite their widespread and established levels of production. Although the forum only addresses the publication channel, the number of academic outputs (conference papers and abstracts) for these types of events can vary from as low as 50, to as high as 10,000+, so the volume of potentially valuable academic knowledge on offer is considerable.

As there is no means of centrally evaluating this scholarly corpus, each output can only be judged on its individual merit. As these outputs are scattered among the multi-disciplinary literature and collation is clearly difficult (as demonstrated in the Finnish Publication Forum returns), then it is quite likely that the scholarly community is overlooking a vast knowledge resource, apart from those who have actually attended the event in question, or for whom conference outputs hold particular esteem. From a disciplinary perspective, this is reflected in the Finnish Publication Forum’s acknowledgement that occasionally, the level of the conference paper will differ (presumably positively) from the determined level of the series or publisher. To this end, the domains of ‘Computer and Information Sciences’ and

‘Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Information Engineering’ have been singled out (Finnish Publication Forum, 2017) as particularly valuing conference papers as

scholarly outputs. Of the 634 conferences that remain on the Finnish Publication Forum system, 66 (10%) are ranked as leading (Level 2) and focus on computer science, information science and engineering. A further 39 conferences are ranked as ‘basic’ (Level 1) and 526 conferences receive a Level 0 attribution. All of these conference publications have similar subject foci, and as an observation, in Google Scholar’s 2018 metrics, the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition is the 20^th ranked top publication, with an h5-index of 188 (median 302). It is not clear how the domain-specific attribution of computer science, information science and engineering conferences has been reached by the Finnish Publication Forum, or why other domains do not have similar attributions, but it is a general reflection of how conferences are attributed general value, and serves to illustrate the complexity and diversity that exists in appreciating conferences as scholarly publishing venues.

As a final observation, an interesting perspective of posters as a publication channel is the legal ruling reported by Adams and Pabst (2004), that posters have been deemed as a legally valid form of publication in the US in a US Supreme Court ruling under 35 U.S.C. § 102. This raises a differentiation between the legal definition of a publication, and the perceptions of what constitutes a valid publication within the ASP community.