How can you compare the quality of conferences?

Question

So I know with journals you can look up the impact factors, but is there any equivalent for conferences?

So I'm looking at IEEE's Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence Conference which seems to be always hosted in Chongqing (). Does it matter (like for networking or citations) if the conference is always hosted in the same city for international participants? The translation on that conference's site seems a bit off (using "Teacher Xu" rather than "Prof. Xu" as is used on the committees page).

Another conference I'm looking at the RSEP International Economics, Finance, and Business Conference? Is there any way to tell if it's legit and not a predatory conference (I didn't find it listed on Beall's list of predatory publishers)? Is there a site that keeps a list of legit conferences or what's the best way to find upcoming non-predatory conferences?

Answer 1

Conferences in Computer Science serve two distinct purposes: As publication venues, and as settings for networking. Being good for one purpose does not necessarily mean being good for the other purpose.

A quick way to get a rough estimate of a conference' quality as publication venue, one can check its CORE-rank. This ranking is flawed (of course), but it seems quite safe to assume that a conference ranked A or A* on CORE is going to be a decent publication venue. (The converse direction is where the flaws are going to be most significant - a great conference may have a bad CORE ranking).

A good-publication-venue conference will be a conference good researchers attend, so there are going to be some networking opportunities. However, it might degenerate into a situation where everyone just attends to give their own talk. At a very large conference, it may be difficult to get a hold of those people you want to talk to - because you physically can't find them, or because the "big shots" have so many other people to talk to.

In my personal experience, smaller, highly focused workshops are the easiest setting for networking. These often count little as publication venues (it makes sense to let everyone in the field give a talk if they want), but it is much easier to get to talk to people. To identify which workshop to go to, look into who attended in the previous years. If the past participants are exactly those you'd want to network with, chances are high the next edition will be suitable for your goals, too.