Conferences versus journals in computer science

AbstractThe question of which type of computer science CS publication-conference or journal-is likely to result in more citations for a published paper is addressed. A series of data sets are examined and joined in order to analyze the citations of over 195,000 conference papers and 108,000 journal papers. Two means of evaluating the citations of journals and conferences are explored: h5 and average citations per paper; it was found that h5 has certain biases that make it a difficult measure to use despite it being the main measure used by Google Scholar. Results from the analysis show that CS, as a discipline, values conferences as a publication venue more highly than any other academic field of study. The analysis also shows that a small number of elite CS conferences have the highest average paper citation rate of any publication type, although overall, citation rates in conferences are no higher than in journals. It is also shown that the length of a paper is correlated with citation rate.