Importance of Conference Publications

My publication profile includes both journal and conference publications. In my field conference publications are very important, are rigorously reviewed, widely disseminated and cited, and are taken very seriously by the research community. As this is somewhat unusual and sometimes misunderstood, a report was written for the National Academy Press and a summary of this report was published in an article entitled ``Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers" published in the April 1994 issue of the Communications of the ACM. This report includes the following paragraph.

``The ECSE research community depends heavily on conferences to communicate knowledge, and conferences are widely regarded as the preferred medium for maximizing the effect of ECSE research. However, the tenure and promotion process at many universities does not give conference presentations and publications a weight appropriate to their significance in the field, preferring instead publications in archival journals."

In fact, the top-notch conferences are highly competitive and papers presented at these conferences are reviewed and widely cited. The three most prestigious conferences relevant to my work are the ACM SIGPLAN sponsored conferences POPL (Principles of Programming Languages), PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation), and OOPSLA (Object Oriented Programming, Systems,Languages and Applications). It is very difficult to get papers accepted into these conferences. Serious researchers send only their best work to these conferences and typically the acceptance rate is about 20%. Papers are reviewed by three program committee members, and usually by at least one person outside the program committee. The papers appear in proceedings that are widely available in print form and through the ACM Digital Library. POPL, PLDI and OOPSLA papers are widely cited and form the core of the research literature in my field. We have had papers appearing in PLDI '92, PLDI '94 (two papers), POPL '96, POPL '98, PLDI '98, OOPSLA '00, OOPSLA '03, PLDI '03, PLDI '05, OOPSLA '04,PLDI '05, OOPLSA '05, OOPLSA '08, OOPSLA '11, and OOPSLA '12.

Of course my group also publishes in wide variety of other excellent conferences. For example our recent work on aspect-oriented programming has appeared in the International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD). We have had papers at AOSD '11, AOSD '10, AOSD '08, AOSD '06 and AOSD '05. Other important conferences include the International Conference in Compiler Construction, where we publish regularly, and a variety of software engineering and program understanding conferences.