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I was wondering if there is any kind of "reliable" CS conferences ranking available on the web. I have searched on SCImago, but I believe it only ranks journals, and there is no mention about conferences. Actually I am curious about it because in the faculty that I am currently working we want to know which papers are presented to good conferences, and which ones are presented to bogus conferences.

Is there any way to know that for the field of Computer Science? I know there are some tools like Google Scholar, but I believe it is not so trustable after all. Should we rely on Scopus maybe?

Any advice? Thanks

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    we want to know which papers are presented to good conferences — The good papers. Which you figure out by actually reading them and by asking for expert opinions (aka reference letters).
    – JeffE
    Aug 5, 2014 at 12:56
  • Microsoft's Academic Search site has a listing of conferences, which seems to be fairly accurate for the top conferences in fields I am familiar with. Not so sure about lower-ranked conferences. academic.research.microsoft.com/…
    – Mike A.
    Aug 6, 2014 at 1:02
  • @MikeA. Unfortunately it looks like that site is no longer up
    – Daniel Kats
    Jan 31, 2022 at 16:08

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There is CORE, an initiative by universities from Australia and New Zealand. On their website, you can find both journal and conference rankings. Most of the rankings are ok, but (of course) there are individual entries that seem too high or too low to me. As far as I know, many research organisations and faculties in the APAC area use this ranking to assign "credit" for papers.

That being said, if your goal is to distinguish good and bogus conferences, I am not sure CORE will actually help you. The main problem is that CORE is only updated every few years, and only with entries which got submitted by somebody during a nomination phase. Hence it is never really complete. Actual bogus conferences (such as the infamous Worldcomp series - see also for instance here) are not listed at all, but so are smaller legit venues as well as any new conference or journal (of any quality). Hence, you can use the presence of a ranking in CORE as a signal that the venue is probably not bogus (it may still subjectively be better or worse than its ranking indicates, but it is very unlikely to be an actual scam), but you cannot use the absence of a ranking to indicate a bogus venue.

Another problem that you may run into is that a few bogus venues have taken up the practice of using a name that is "coincidentally" very similar to existing high-ranked venues (cp. the top-quality WWW conference and the very low-quality WWW/Internet conference). To complicate matters further, in some emerging fields, even more or less established publishers sometimes churn out journals with basically identical names at more or less the same time (e.g., Springer's Journal of Cloud Computing vs Inderscience's Journal of Cloud Computing).

Finally, established conferences occasionally change their name, sometimes as part of a merger with other conferences, and hence "fall of" the ranking if you do not know what the conference used to be called in the past.

All that is to say that CORE is a tool that can help you get a feel for the value of a publication, but it will not relief you from the task of actually looking at the publications themselves to assess their value.

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    To add to this answer, it should be stated that the input by Australian and NZ researchers is also used to rank the conferences. Thus, the far-too-low ranked conferences coincide quite well with the ones that such researchers rarely attend because of geographics, and the too-high ranked ones are likely to be those that Austrarian and NZ researchers tend to take part in more frequently. For the aim of CORE, this is no problem, but when misusing the CORE ranking for other purposes (it's still the best ranking that "we" have), with this filter in mind, the ranking can be more useful.
    – DCTLib
    Aug 5, 2014 at 7:56
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    In my opinion (and I'm not from Australia or NZ), the CORE ratings are quite reliable for conferences that have them (it's true that for those that don't have a rating, you never know). Yes, there might be some under- or over-valued conferences, but that happens in any ranking, including the overhyped ISI JCR impact factors for journals - which in my view are less reliable than CORE as there are really poor journals in Q1. As far as I know, all the conferences that have the A* (maximum) rating in CORE are really top tier.
    – Al-Khwarizmi
    May 5, 2017 at 15:19
  • Is the h-index a good measure to rank conferences? Atleast divide them into bins? For instance in Computer Vision, CVPR, ECCV and ICCV would make up the first tier, followed by WACV, BMVC, ACCV in the second.
    – Jihadi
    Apr 23, 2020 at 5:17
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Check the last answer at To publish or not to publish a paper in an ERA "type C" conference? - I put there several community rankings, highlighting some problems with CORE ranking. But CORE is a good start, I agree with the previous answer. P.S. Google Scholar does index conferences, but not correctly identifies all of them

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The Chinese Computer Science Federation's rankings are, in my experience, very good. You can view an English translation of them at the PandaSearch website. Searching Google for "computer science conference rankings" will turn up several alternative ranking lists; of these, the Chinese rankings are the most stringent.

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The website http://valutazione.unibas.it/cs-conference-rating allows you to look for a conference and gives you its rating in not one, but three conference rankings (CORE, MAS and SHINE), together with an aggregate rating.

I think the CORE ranking is pretty reliable as far as rankings go, for the conferences that are listed. You only need to be careful with not equating "unlisted" with "bad" - it may just be a small conference or one that was not included because researchers in CORE's geographic area didn't participate in it lately. But for conferences that are listed, the ratings are quite trustworthy. CORE A* (in the aggregator website they call it A++) are top tier conferences.

I can't vouch for the other two rankings as I haven't used them much, although the three of them seem to be at least roughly in agreement most of the time.

A caveat: the aggregator was updated in 2015, while if you go straight to the source for CORE, you'll get ranks from 2017.

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  • A revised version of the ranking, updated with the new CORE data, is available at valutazione.unibas.it/gii-grin-scie-rating and now also involves the Spanish Computer-Science Society, besides Italian GII and GRIN.
    – Maiaux
    Jun 5, 2017 at 7:45
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The most reliable and up-to-date ranking I know of is the GII/GRIN Computer Science and Computer Engineering Rating, which is based on CORE, SHINE, and Microsoft Academic Research Conference Ranking, and has undergone several manual adjustments. It only includes conferences so far, but it's a good start.

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A revised version of the ranking, updated with the new CORE 2017 data, is available at valutazione.unibas.it/gii-grin-scie-rating and now also involves the Spanish Computer-Science Society, besides Italian GII and GRIN.

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