If I presented a poster at a conference that contained the results of some research, can I then write a paper using those same results and submit it to another conference as a full paper?
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1For any serious conference you are required to refer to previous work in your full paper. If you mention that the exact same result was presented at a previous conference, I'm guessing your paper would be rejected. Not mentioning that it's been presented at another conference is unethical. The only good option is doing some more work, such that the full paper is an extension of the work presented in the poster. (An obvious exemption is if you're invited to resubmit a paper, e.g. to a higher-level conference.)– semi-extrinsicOct 27, 2015 at 22:22
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3What's the field? This will depend on your field's norms, and to what extent conference presentations are considered "publications". For instance, @semi-extrinsic's comments aren't true in my field (math), where you can present a project in dozens of conferences or posters and nobody expects this to be mentioned at all in the final published paper.– Nate EldredgeOct 28, 2015 at 0:58
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2Most importantly: Was the poster associated with a publication other than an abstract?– Wrzlprmft ♦Oct 28, 2015 at 9:17
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@NateEldredge when you say my comments don't apply to your field, I take it you mean the "I'm guessing the paper would be rejected" part? Or would you also avoid mentioning in the final paper that this was presented previously one or more venues? I'm just curious. For reference, in my field (comp.phys) it's quite common for all conference contributions, even the posters, to have an accompanying paper in the proceedings.– semi-extrinsicOct 28, 2015 at 14:02
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@semi-extrinsic: No part of your comment really applies in my field (except the first part about citing previous work; but previous conference presentations by the same author on the same work do not count). I have never seen a published paper mention the conferences at which the work has been presented. Note that conferences in my field almost never have published proceedings. If you did publish your work in conference proceedings, then what you said applies.– Nate EldredgeOct 28, 2015 at 14:28
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2 Answers
This depends on the customs of the field and the venue. I will answer based upon my experience from an HCI-related subfield of CS:
Conferences usually have some requirement of novelty for published works. Therefore, if a paper associated with the poster already appeared in some proceedings of the first conference, you might not fulfil this requirement. First, however, some different cases might apply:
- If the poster was not "formally published" (i.e. did not appear as a (short) paper in any kind of proceedings), you should be good to go.
- If the poster was supposed to be "formally published", but the conference organizers never got around to setting up the proceedings of the poster session, you're in a bit of an inconvenient situation. Your work is not published in a way that it can be cited (well, it can, but it doesn't look as verifiable as other papers and is not archived by any publisher), but it has been presented. You may want to contact the conference organizers in this case whether publishing your work again is ok, or else you may want to wrap your work in something larger (i.e. present something new, but reiterate the points from the poster as a part of the exposition).
Even if your poster was published in some kind of proceedings, there may be some options:
- Posters are often allowed to present work in progress. If your poster (and the connected paper) was presented in a way to present work in progress, your new conference paper might indeed present the final state of whatever you devised. This can essentially match the content of your poster, but provide more details (see also below).
- Even if the poster presented final results, the term "results" seems to be seen in a very wide sense at least in my fields, possibly in others. A full conference paper provides much more space than a poster paper, and on the poster, you probably presented different (more visual) things than you would in text. As such, you can shift the focus of your conference paper compared to the poster; where the poster focused on the results, the conference paper might discuss the methods used to obtain the results in depth, including design decisions, citations of similar experiments, a verification of the reliability of your experiments, etc. This kind of description can be useful for the community and subsequent works, and as such should provide enough new content, despite being based upon the same material as the poster.
answered Oct 28, 2015 at 11:12
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Thank you O. R. Mapper for your help , My Poster result was never published so im good to go , by the way, im in computer science fielde– NousaNov 10, 2015 at 19:33
This depends a great deal on the field and conference that you have in mind. Generally, it should be stated in the call for papers. If there is no explicit mention of novelty requirements, that probably means the research cannot be resubmitted in a longer form or that the field has a very clear, established convention.
To take an example from a premier conference in Computer Science, a poster paper can be resubmitted, with the addition of novel contributions, provided that the previous submission was sufficiently short and not published in a journal:
Every research paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016 must present substantial novel research not described in any prior publication. In this context, a prior publication is (a) a paper of five pages or more presented, or accepted for presentation, at a refereed conference or workshop with proceedings; or (b) an article published, or accepted for publication, in a refereed journal. If a SIGMOD 2016 submission has overlap with a prior publication, the submission must cite the prior publication, along with all other relevant published work, following the guidelines in the Anonymity Requirements for Double-Blind Reviewing section below.
However, the paper is still likely to be rejected if there is not sufficiently more material in the new paper; I cannot imagine any venue of high quality simply republishing material that has already appeared somewhere else.