Author-Based Analysis of Conference versus Journal Publication in Computer Science
It provides incremental insights for scholars and administrators outside computer science who rely on journal data for evaluation, highlighting the unique role of conferences in the field.
This study analyzed the publishing patterns of 517,763 computer science scholars over 57 years using DBLP data, finding that most debut, publish more, and collaborate more in conferences than journals, with conferences serving as a distinct communication channel rather than a step to journals.
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.