To publish or not to publish a paper in an ERA "type C" conference?

Question

I have been researching a topic in Computer Science for several years now. The topic was interesting, but while I managed to get some conclusive results, I was not completely happy about them. It was like something was missing, but I knew that I really needed to talk to somebody more specialized in the topic, but unfortunately a lot of external professors that I contacted did not have enough time to collaborate. Anyway I submitted it to two conferences, which were ranked like B according to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) schema:

A* - flagship conference
A - excellent conference, determined by a mix of indicators
B - good conference, determined by a mix of indicators
C - other ranked conference venues

The final verdict at both conferences was a weak reject. So I made the corrections that the reviewers suggested and submitted it to another conference. This new conference has a rank of C, but it deals with the subject that I was making research; the final verdict was accepted as a borderline paper.

Now, the question that I have is that if I should present my paper at that conference, or should I try to fix other things and resubmit to other higher-ranked venues? For me it would be more practical to leave it as is, and let another researcher pick it up if she is so interested.

Answer 1

You should have asked yourself this question before you submitted to the conference. Withdrawing your paper now, after it's been accepted, means you wasted a bunch of people's time (editor, reviewers, ...). Do unto others ...

Additionally, given that it was accepted as a borderline paper and was rejected at two previous conferences may be a hint that your work is not perceived as top of the line by external referees. I doubt you can shoot much higher than what you have now.

Answer 2

ERA ranking is subjective, I am not aware of peer-reviewed evidence that it works. Personally, I know conferences ranked as A, and whose quality is below acceptable. On the other hand, EuroPLoP is the premier conference for software patterns practitioners, and is ranked B in ERA.

So, do not dismiss a conference just because it is marked as C there. If it is not relevant to Australian community, it does not mean it is not relevant to European/Asian/US community. It is always better to see PC, authors published in the past editions, and other factors to make a decision, not relying on some subjective number.

BTW, there are more conference rankings:

• Conference H-index calculator
• Microsoft Academic Search ranking
• community rankings: http://perso.crans.org/~genest/conf.html and http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/assourav/crank.htm

Answer 3

ERA rankings are a left-over from earlier days when venues couldn't be easily and quantifiably evaluated in terms of "impact". The ERA rankings are/were driven by apparent popularity and "votes" cast by a small subset of Australian academics. This makes ERA rankings dubious since they are largely subjective.

These days one has access to various online tools to evaluate the impact of a venue, such as Google Scholar Metrics (h5-index) and Scimago Journal Rank. In turn, these tools often expose many ERA rankings as erroneous.

In terms of getting feedback on your work, conferences are not the only venues. You may also want to try "Letters" type of journals, which allow publication of short communications. Even if your paper isn't accepted, the feedback from the reviewers can be very useful.