Author-Based Analysis of Conference versus Journal Publication in Computer Science

TL;DR

This study analyzes 57 years of data on computer science scholars, revealing that conferences serve as a distinct and primary communication channel, with different authorship and collaboration patterns compared to journals.

Contribution

It provides an author-based analysis of publishing patterns, highlighting the distinct roles of conferences and journals in CS scholarly communication.

Findings

Most scholars debut and publish more in conferences

Conference papers have less overlap with journal papers in authorship and topics

Conferences serve as a separate communication channel, not just a step to journals

Abstract

Conference publications in computer science (CS) have attracted scholarly attention due to their unique status as a main research outlet unlike other science fields where journals are dominantly used for communicating research findings. One frequent research question has been how different conference and journal publications are, considering a paper as a unit of analysis. This study takes an author-based approach to analyze publishing patterns of 517,763 scholars who have ever published both in CS conferences and journals for the last 57 years, as recorded in DBLP. The analysis shows that the majority of CS scholars tend to make their scholarly debut, publish more papers, and collaborate with more coauthors in conferences than in journals. Importantly, conference papers seem to serve as a distinct channel of scholarly communication, not a mere preceding step to journal publications: coauthors and title words of authors across conferences and journals tend not to overlap much. This study corroborates findings of previous studies on this topic from a distinctive perspective and suggests that conference authorship in CS calls for more special attention from scholars and administrators outside CS who have focused on journal publications to mine authorship data and evaluate scholarly performance.