I am a Masters student. I wrote my first paper and sent it to a conference in Spain. To my surprise, they accepted my paper. Now I am hesitating, because I am afraid that my first work is not good enough. It will affect my future plan to study for a PhD. Should I publish it, or just cancel the conference submission and complete the paper to publish later in a journal?
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1Please don't tell me to ask my supervisor , he is such a type of person who let you count to one thousand before asking a question.– PauloCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 11:38
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3What is your field? In fields such as computer science the primary venue of publication is conferences...– DMMLCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:26
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7The conference looks fine to me, don't worry. The first paper will not have a great impact on your career. Go ahead, go to the conference, meet people and continue to do research.– DirkCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:48
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9I am afraid that my first work is not good enough — Do not listen to the Impostor Syndrome.– JeffECommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:49
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3@Paulo I can't comment on that particular conference, as it is outside of my area. Perhaps another user on this site can comment specifically. To give an answer that is broadly applicable: every discipline/subdiscipline has its own set of "premiere venues". In computer science these venues are typically conferences, with the premier conferences being specific to each subdiscipline. To answer your question, you shouldn't regret publishing in a conference, since you are CS. You should, however, be concerned with the prestige of the conference in question.– DMMLCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:54
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4 Answers
Personally, I don't think that it is considered "bad" to publish a conference paper. Even less so, if it is your first paper. Nobody can expect you to release in a top journal of your subject all the time and especially not with your first article.
Where I am from you do not need to publish anything before your PhD, so I am not sure how important this is in your case. From my point of view, though, anything published is better than nothing (in this case at least).
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Thank you very much, the problem is i don't know if the conference is good or not .– PauloCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:10
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Well, that is often difficult to find out. Criteria that might help you decide are: Has the conference existed for a long time? Have known scientists contributed? Have you read any of the papers published there and how did you deem their quality?– IanCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:34
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3This is the 11th year for the conference , i found their previous years (from 2012 to 2015) proceedings in Ieee explore– PauloCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 12:38
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@Paulo: The first source for conference quality in CS is the database maintained by Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. Unlike many other "lists of good conferences", they have a clearly defined and frequently evaluated method to do their ranking. ICITST is not in their database, though, which, however, is not necessarily a bad sign. The second source to check is the acceptance rate of past instances. You can find this in the preface of the proceedings. Roughly, an acceptance rate < 20% maps to A and < 35% to B level.– DanielCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 21:49
In my field (biological sciences), any publication on a PhD application looks great. Assuming the conference is well-established and attended by legit players in the field, I would advise you to publish the conference paper. Getting a paper reviewed for a different journal is risky (they could reject it) and time-consuming. The process may not be done by the time you start applying for PhD programs. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
A conference that's supported by a major professional body/learned society (like the IEEE) is generally a safe bet. But be sure to check that it's listed by the body in question, there are plenty of fake conference websites that will lie about everything. This one is listed on the IEEE website which is encouraging. That's not to say that it's the best conference in the field, but that doesn't matter -- a minor but correctly specialist conference is much more manageable early in your career than a huge conference with thousnads of people, many parallel sessions, etc.
Go for it, don't do anything stupid, talk to people, and it has a much better chance of helping your career than harming it. And as you're quite new to the field, make a point of getting to all the plenary/invited talks you can -- the former in particular should be a great introduction to areas you haven't learnt much about yet.
Practice your talk in front of a real audience at least twice, taking the comments from the first time into account before the second time. You really do need to talk to your supervisor at some point regarding authorship etc.
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1"that will lie about everything" - or, even when assuming less straightforward malevolence, will make statements that can be grossly misleading for inexperienced readers, such as "publication of proceedings with IEEE planned". Commented Oct 12, 2016 at 18:43
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@O.R.Mapper, good point. I'd read not long ago about a conference claiming all sorts of eminent scientists on the panel, none of whom had even heard of it, hence jumping straight to the "gross lie" type of predatory conference.– Chris HCommented Oct 13, 2016 at 8:21
You are suffering the Impostor syndrome.
You send a paper to a conference, they read it and most likely without looking who you are decided that its good enough for the conference. That means that your work pairs with the other people's work quality or at least that the committee decided that your work would be interesting for the audience. So, go for it!
Additionally, academics are, in general, quite aware of the limitations/capabilities of students in different levels of their education. When you are there, presenting, they won't try to force you to have the knowledge/skills of a professor, but probably instead will be thinking "amazing student, he is still in his masters and already is presenting us nice work". Conferences tend to be casual and friendly, and you'll have people approach you more to help you than criticize you.
Additionally, if you are planning to continue your studies as a PhD students, this is a brilliant opportunity to meet academics around and ask them about possibilities for your future.
About the journal: later, you can always extend conference works into journals. It is a common strategy in lots of fields to publish preliminary results or "half papers" in conferences and then extend them to a jorunal article.
In short: Go to the conference. It will be fun.
answered Oct 12, 2016 at 16:03
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My experience in computer science (albeit ten years ago and in a different subfield) is that conference submissions are not reviewed blind. I got papers to review with full author information all the time. Commented Oct 12, 2016 at 17:56
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@HenningMakholm which doesn't mean that they check who the authors are. Some conference reviewers parse +20 papers, often they dont even bother checking the authors name/affiliation Commented Oct 12, 2016 at 18:00
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@HenningMakholm: That depends a lot on the subfield. There are subfields where blind review (or even double blind review) is done by many conferences, and others where it isn't. Commented Oct 12, 2016 at 18:44