Finding conferences in subject area (Medical Informatics)

Question

I am struggling to find conferences in my subject area, preferably in Western Europe. My supervisor tends to be otherwise very busy and is poor at actually providing this information in practice.

My area isn't terribly niche: it concerns text mining of medical information (therefore straddling both medical informatics and computer science).

Is there a website that contains lists of informatics conferences? Or a particular avenue that one should ideally use when looking for conferences in this area?

Answer 1

Is this anything like what you're looking for?

Doing some searching of my own, I definitely ran across the problem you mention -- the lists of events in your field are often out of date. So, while there are sites that list conferences by discipline, they might not work very well for you (the one linked above being a tentative exception). This might partially be peculiar to your field, though it does appear in others as well.

However, part of the problem might also lie within search patterns. Hybrid topics are often hard to search successfully due to conflagration of terms, and it seems this remains true for hybrid disciplines.

If you're not already familiar with them, it's definitely a good idea to acquaint yourself with Google's search operators; they can significantly ease your search-related challenges. My favorite is the tilde (~), which when placed before a term includes results with synonyms -- very useful.

Searching like this, I was able to find some individual conferences which seem to have their call for submission still open. (I know little to nothing about your particular field, so if I got these wrong, I apologize):

• http://www.imia-medinfo.org/new2/events
• http://datamining.conferenceseries.com/call-for-abstracts.php (track 3 on the page)
• http://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/calls

Answer 2

General lists of conferences tend to be of low quality. There are a lot of "for-profit" type conferences that you want to avoid.

Your supervisor is the best avenue. However, if they aren't available as you point out, the next best thing is to look at the references section of journal articles related to your specific topic and identify conferences that way. Frequently conference papers are cited in addition to published papers, so that will give you an idea of where the people in your specific field go to discuss their research with colleagues.

Answer 3

A few things I can recommend:

You have most likely done a literature review on your area of research. Take a look at where those papers have been submitted (the more recent ones especially), and search for those specific conferences online for more information. You can use google scholar to winnow by publication date and can view the number of paper citations.

A quick search online came up with these lists for top data mining conferences, which can give you a reasonable start: Microsoft Academic Search, Conferences in Data Mining, Microsoft Academic Search, Natural language & speech, The top 10 NLP conferences. Search within a few top conferences to see if papers on your specific topic have been published within them. Try 'text data mining proceedings' in google scholar for some ideas as well.

Don't forget to ask other graduate students who have been around longer for their advice as well. They will probably be able to tell you at least two or three top conferences that they regularly apply to each year.

I'm not sure about your field specifically, but in my experience conferences are grouped between submission dates in the fall and submission dates in the spring. Once you have a list of reasonable conferences you can choose one by the current date appropriately.

Answer 4

I see your area as what can be broadly seen as Information Systems:

text mining of medical information (therefore straddling both medical informatics and computer science

In this field, the two major associations are the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). You can find various regional and premiere conferences on their websites. They also welcome textmining, medical informatics, and other novel approaches to information systems.