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During my career as a researcher, I have attended many high-quality conferences in my research field and presented papers. In general there are some rules about the number of papers accepted which belong to a researcher as an author. I can take it normally one person can be an author for a paper, or two. What about five papers?
My question is;
Can I use the term abuse if someone (first author or not) submits five papers to a conference?
Why would you think of it as abuse? If the conference has rules that prohibit it then the author is breaking the rules, otherwise not. The more important question is whether the papers have merit. If they do, all is good. If not, they will be rejected in due course. In the latter case, the committee can admonish the author about a flood of junk.
The conference program committee doesn't need to accept a lot of papers from an individual and I think in most cases they would like a variety of authors to be represented, but that is their concern. It also seems a valid "policy."
The committee also needs to be prepared to review, according to their normal methods, all papers submitted. The selection, however, probably involves actually accepting fewer papers than the reviewers approve, just for time and space.
The "problem" if there is one, will resolve itself.
If the committee doesn't want this to happen in future, they can write rules into future submission criteria.
The appropriateness of submitting 5 papers to a conference depends on what the nature of the conference is and on how coauthorship is done. Is the conference competitive, or just a way for people to meet up and share ideas? If each paper has 5 authors, is it strange for one author to be on 5 submissions?
In my area of computer science, I've seen someone with 5 papers accepted to one conference. The only thing this made anyone think is that the individual is impressively productive.
In any case, I don't see how it rises to the level of "abuse", unless this person is genuinely spamming the conference (e.g. with computer-generated papers). Each paper should be judged on its merits.
I agree with you. I sometimes do think that people don't really care about conferences or what they are presenting. They just need that line on their CV, at least, this is what I sensed in my department. I don't even think it's appropriate to present the same research at different conferences, but that's what people do all the time. Frankly, I do it too. Why? because I need publications to get a job and scholarships. So it's largely determined by the market, or the reality.
