How to list both journals and conferences on your CV when you have worked in two fields with different publication cultures?

Question

I used to be in a field where journals were much more prestigious than conferences, so I kept journals and conferences in separate sections (assuming that people would care a lot less about the conferences). Now I have switched to computer science, where conferences are the main venue of publication, and my only first-author paper is now a conference paper. Do I still keep journals and conferences separate? It feels weird to put my only first-author paper in the same section as a random poster presentation my coauthor gave.

I'm also thinking of having one section for "publications," and listing all the papers reverse-chronologically, except for the non-important conferences, which I'd put at the end.

Answer 1

I work with this situation myself right now, as I am active simultaneously in two fields with these opposing publication cultures. This is further complicated by the fact that some of the publications I am most proud of are not peer reviewed in any fashion (e.g., standards documents).

I thus simply organize all of my publications according to categories and try to include enough information that people from different fields may at least understand that there is a culture gap. The current categories in my CV are:

• Journal Articles
• Book Chapters & Theses
• Peer-Reviewed Conference Articles
• Peer-Reviewed Conference Abstracts
• Workshops, Symposia, and Seminars
• Published Whitepapers and Technical Reports

This allows me to distinguish between conferences that people should take seriously ("Peer-Reviewed Conference Articles") and those which they should view as "light weight" ("Peer-Reviewed Conference Abstracts"). Conference poster presentations that haven't even received meaningful peer review I don't even list at this point, though at an earlier stage I would have put them down as another category.

Answer 2

It's a hard question since you're likely to confuse CS folks who have different experiences with how conferences and journals compare for quality and selectivity between your old field and CS. In my PhD field, conferences rarely had an actual paper, and were usually just a talk based on a submitted abstract with no peer review. CS tends to have strong archival papers with good peer review at its conferences with occasional post-publication of selected conference papers in journals.

I would have 3 sections: Journals, Peer-reviewed Conference Papers, and Conferences. Whether the latter is just talks and/or non-peer-reviewed papers, you should label the entries clearly.

Answer 3

Create a field called Most notable publications and put both of them there. You may decide to sub-divide it by the field or not, but you need not sub-divide it by the publication type. Rather, you can distinguish proceedings and papers by the format:

J. Doe. My Article on ABC. Journal of DEF 55(3):500–540, 2010.

J. Doe. My Conference Paper on KLM. In: “International Congress on NOP” (Atlantis, 2013), Proceeding Series in QRS 5187:350–355, 2014.

This distinction is so clear that nobody should be confused. Also, you can then make a list of All publications or Other publications, if you want to make the CV longer, but that depends on the reason why you write the CV and on your preference.