3

One of my manuscripts was prepared for submission to a CORE-A conference in Computer Science. There are only 2 days due for submission of the paper. As usual, I usually get my paper reviewed by one of my colleagues. However, I was surprised by his remark that the manuscript looks like a complete paper and should be submitted to a journal instead.

This is creating a mood switch in me as I am highly confused whether should I submit to the conference or a journal suggested by him. I already have one paper submitted to the conference along with my students which should not influence this submission (as per answer here). Moreover, I am not interested in working on the extension of the presently prepared work (so this question does not come into the situation). So, I just want to get my work published somewhere in a good venue.

Is it common in research dissemination? How should I decide on the possible venue given such a short deadline of 2 days?

Improve this question

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
5

If your paper is ready to go and in good shape for a high-impact conference, I would recommend sticking with the conference.

The reasons that I would suggest doing so are:

  • In many subfields of Computer Science, a highly competitive conference publication is often effectively worth more than a journal publication.
  • The conference deadline is now. If it doesn't get into the conference, you can always choose to send it to a journal later.
  • If it's well received and/or you get interesting feedback from the reviewers or audience, you might end up changing your mind about whether to submit an extended version to a journal. You can't change your mind in the other direction.
Improve this answer
3
  • 1
    I agree many competitive conferences are harder to get into than various journals. In CS Systems, the top journals are competitive, but top conferences totally dominate them in that regard. My experience is that most papers go first to a conference and only after that to a journal --- journal-first publications are very rare. That being said, I think it's hard to convince deans and the like to weight the conferences higher than the journals, which could be why the colleague pushed for the journal. Shame OP doesn't want to extend the work, as that seems best (conf now, journal later).
    – Fred Douglis
    Jun 12, 2017 at 21:11
  • +1. I agree with your answer and as per comment by @FredDouglis. In Science discipline, the conference is not like that happen in technology and engineering and in my university, there is a mixture of people in the admin from both Science and ET areas. Although in CS the H-index of these top conferences is higher than few journals in that area, it sometimes gets complex during the annual appraisal process.
    – Coder
    Jun 13, 2017 at 6:44
  • @Coder: Even then, journals can be slower or much slower. I've seen journals accepting papers without extra material from conference papers (though that's not standard).
    – Blaisorblade
    Jun 14, 2017 at 0:03
4

Submit to the conference.

However, I was surprised by his remark that the manuscript looks like a complete paper and should be submitted to a journal instead.

Coming from a computer scientist, that seems surprising. Unless your employer confuses CS conferences with other non-peer-reviewed conferences, and doesn't value them for promotion/tenure: that happens, and is one reason for some to publish journal versions of conference papers at all.

Feel free to look at Google Scholar metrics for your field to gauge venues. For instance, in programming languages (my subfield), the top venues are all conferences (most journals below are software engineering):

https://scholar.google.it/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=eng_softwaresystems

Improve this answer
2

Submit to the conference first in an abstracted form and then expand the work into a full blown paper. I'm in one of the STEM disciplines, but I worked in a computer science department for years. They basically targeted only conferences, but when they were up for it, they followed up with a journal paper. If the latter is pretty much done, why not condense it into a conference proceeding and expand it along the line into a full paper?

Improve this answer
3
  • 3
    Top computer science conferences generally want full papers, not just abstracts.
    – jakebeal
    Jun 12, 2017 at 23:17
  • 2
    @jakebeal - I think Alice is saying something similar to what you said, only she's recognizing that OP already wrote the "extended version" that you spoke of, so she's suggesting OP reduce it down in the next two days for submission to the conference. I didn't take the word "abstract" as literally as you did when I read her answer.
    – aparente001
    Jun 13, 2017 at 3:20
  • 1
    The OP prepared the paper for the conference (and its page limits), so it should need no abstracting. EDIT: in most cases, we arguably write all that matters within conference page limits.
    – Blaisorblade
    Jun 14, 2017 at 0:13

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .