Conference Proceedings or Journal Articles: a case study of publications of Canadian computer scientists

A presentation at C-EBLIP Fall Symposium, October 15, 2014, University of Saskatchewan.Conference proceedings are an important venue for publishing original research and often final research in computer science. They represent a large body of the literature in this field, and are generally considered as important, if not more, as journal articles. However, the quality or impact of conference proceedings has been controversial. This research tries to compare the impact of conference proceedings with that of journal articles, studying publications of Canadian computer scientists. Specifically, the following questions will be addressed: what is the percentage of conference proceedings in the computer science literature? What are the trends of publishing in this field? And more important, are there differences between proceedings and journal articles in terms of their structure and impact? Methods: 30 faculty members in the computer science departments, schools, or equivalent from 15 Canadian research universities were randomly selected. Scopus database was searched to identify publications by each of the 30 faculty. The structure of the two types of publications (conference proceedings and journal articles) and their impact were studied. Implications: The research findings will provide a better understanding of scholarly communication in computer science field. The results will: enable research evaluators to make informed decision when assessing the publications of computer scientists; h elp computer scientists to decide where to publish their research in order to achieve greater impact, and to select what document types to read from an increasing number of papers; help computer science librarians in collection development and in information literacy program delivery