Does the Venue of Scientific Conferences Leverage their Impact? A Large Scale study on Computer Science Conferences

TL;DR

This large-scale study investigates whether the impact of computer science conferences correlates with the venue's touristic appeal, revealing a significant relationship that could influence future conference planning and impact estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis linking conference impact to venue characteristics, especially touristic indicators, based on extensive bibliographic data over 30 years.

Findings

Conference impact correlates with country-wide touristic indicators.

Tourist infrastructure quality shows a near-linear relationship with conference impact.

Venue characteristics can help estimate conference impact in advance.

Abstract

Background: Conferences bring scientists together and provide one of the most timely means for disseminating new ideas and cutting-edge works.The importance of conferences in scientific areas is testified by quantitative indicators. In Computer Science, for instance, almost two out of three papers published on Scopus are conference papers. Objective/Purpose: The main goal of this paper is to investigate a novel research question: is there any correlation between the impact of a scientific conference and the venue where it took place? Approach: In order to measure the impact of conferences we conducted a large scale analysis on the bibliographic data extracted from 3,838 Computer Science conference series and over 2.5 million papers spanning more than 30 years of research. To quantify the "touristicity" of a venue we exploited some indicators such as the size of the Wikipedia page for the city hosting the venue and other indexes from reports of the World Economic Forum. Results/Findings: We found out that the two aspects are related, and the correlation with conference impact is stronger when considering country-wide touristic indicators, such as the Travel&Tourism Competitiveness Index. More-over the almost linear correlation with the Tourist Service Infrastructure index attests the specific importance of tourist/accommodation facilities in a given country. Conclusions: This is the first attempt to focus on the relationship of venue characteristics to conference papers. The results open up new possibilities, such as allowing conference organizers and authors to estimate in advance the impact of conferences, thus supporting them in their decisions.