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Conference vs Journal Publications in Computer Science

7 May 2004

I enjoy having a frequent peek at the Computational Complexity Weblog maintained by Lance Fortnow. In his posting of Wednesday, April 28, 2004, Lance has touched upon a favourite hobby horse of mine, namely the issue of "Conferences versus Journals" in (theoretical) computer science. I share Lance's opinon that

Too many papers in our field, including many great ones, do not get submitted to refereed journals. ..... Conference program committees cannot and do not produce full referee reports on conference submissions. Proofs are not verified. Papers are not proofread carefully for mistakes and suggested improvement of presentation. Computer science suffers by not having the permanency and stamp of approval of a journal publication on many of its best papers. .... Many papers in our field do appear in journals and some researchers are extremely diligent in making sure all of their work appears in refereed form. Also I know of no computer scientist who purposely avoids sending their papers to a journal. But when we have a system that does not value journal publications, a computer scientist pressed for time often will not make the effort to take their papers past the conference version.

I have little to add to these opinions of Lance's, but let me say that my meagre editorial experience has convinced me that even papers that have received a wide exposure at the conference publication stage, are widely cited and whose results have been used in subsequent research improve greatly, from the point of view of both presentation and correctness of the technical details, after a couple of refereeing rounds in which dedicated and interested reviewers have scrutinized the paper for correctness. Sometimes (often?) the pudding is in the technicalities, and their correctness can rarely be fully assessed at the conference level.

I think that the whole community will be served by the availability of full papers, whose technical results can be scrutinized and used by eager students and researchers. It is a lot of work to produce a paper with full details, but I believe that it is worth the effort. Since the advice we give others is the advice we need ourselves, maybe I should start doing this from my next paper --- if such a paper ever comes, that is.