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I had recently submitted a paper to an IEEE conference and got accepted, but for poster presentation. This is the very first time I have written a paper. Although it is a great achievement for me given my inexperience in the field, my goal is to get it published.

  • Does IEEE publish papers accepted for posters presentations?
  • Should I pass on the poster presentation and send my paper to a journal?
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    It never hurts to present your work as a poster, but as far as I know, no poster sessions are published. Which means you get to gain experience and still publish later. That said, I'd do both. Don't pass on a poster session, but don't give up on publishing your work, either. Jan 31, 2014 at 17:12

2 Answers 2

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It depends on the particular conference and the field. In computer science (where the main publication venue is conferences), many conferences divide the published papers into "talks" and "posters" (eg NIPS, AISTATS, ...), and there's no difference in terms of publication.

In most other fields, however, acceptance at a conference means nothing, and you have to get published in a journal.

TL;DR: ask your advisor.

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It depends on the conference. Many conferences publish the one page abstract that you're sometimes required to submit with the poster, but not all of them. If you didn't have to write the 1-page summary as part of the submission, don't expect it to be published. The poster itself is almost never published (I personally recommend that you make the poster available on the web).

Despite that, you CAN still list it as a publication on your CV, but posters are generally not worth very much and it's good to compartmentalize them to their own section of the CV so that your (eventual) journal and conference papers get priority.

A bit more description about "weight" and whether you should pass or not:

Generally, the weight of a publication (all else being equal, like let's assume for a moment that every paper's research content is the same) depends on the venue it's in and the type of publication it is. Posters are on the bottom, then short papers, then full conference papers. Usually, you get a poster because the work isn't developed enough to fill up a full paper. One thing to note is that if you "compartmentalize" your work well enough, you should be able to get the poster out and then later extend it to the journal without any issues - that is, if your journal builds upon your poster (quite often by adding more results, more interpretations/implications from the data, more analysis, etc.) then you'll have no problem with having both the poster and the later journal paper/conference paper.

I would like to take a moment to say that while this usually is okay for posters (poster to journal/conference paper), taking this path from a short paper/note to conference paper is often wrought with more problems. Because short papers already present an approach and sometimes results, you need to ensure that the full paper builds SIGNIFICANTLY on the short paper for it to be a real contribution. I've been seeing more recently people highlighting differences between short papers and long papers as a result (ex: "This paper builds upon the work presented in [1] by adding a thorough evaluation through two lab studies and one industrial field study"). You need to do this because if you don't, and someone does a web search for the topic of the paper, they might find your short paper and then be all like, "So it looks like someone has done this before". Unlike in a poster, where you really don't get that much space to talk about much of anything, you can usually discuss something of substance in a short paper.

Anyway, in general, it's usually okay to present posters and then later expand them into journals or conference papers. Poster presentations are healthy in that they are a quick and easy way to get yourself "out there", solicit feedback from the community, and get further ideas for what you want to do with your work. You can usually use the feedback from the poster session to build upon what you have and get a stronger research direction in the future. But do be aware that you're not "self-scooping" yourself by putting super-important results in a poster, because posters have low impact.

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  • Ok..I am attaching a piece of text from the acceptance e-mail I received, it says : "Please note that for the paper to be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library at least one of the authors must be present at the conference. Please do take the comments and suggestions of the reviewers into account while preparing the camera ready paper to further improve the quality of your paper." There is still a certain amount of ambiguity regarding whether it will be published even in its abstract form.Is it ok for me to contact the conference and ask them ?
    – Geekidiot
    Feb 1, 2014 at 5:55
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    In many CS conferences, a poster paper is basically the same as short papers. In fact most of the cases, you write a normal paper, which is bordeline so it only gets accepted as a poster paper. So, the camera ready copy should be trimmed to be included in the proceedings. I believe in the conference call for papers, it says the maximum length of the paper for poster presentations. So refer there for the correct length, before submitting the camera ready copy.
    – Alexandros
    Feb 1, 2014 at 16:01
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    @Geekidiot If you submitted a paper and received a note about it appearing in the IEEE Digital Library then chances are high that the submitted paper is going to be published.
    – Irwin
    Feb 3, 2014 at 17:27

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