Where to Publish Your First Paper — Conference or Journal?

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Publishing our first research paper in a conference or a journal is a process that we have to pay our full attention. Depending on where you publish your academic paper the value and the solidity of your work will be increased. This article will discuss some highly important points that we have to consider when publishing an academic paper for the first time based on my #ScholarX supervisor’s (Prof Arosha Bandara) comments and my personal experiences. I hope this might be a good starting point for the students who are willing to publish their first research work.

When publishing your research work you have two main options namely going for conference proceedings or journal publications. So I will divide this article into two main sections for conferences and journals. Then discuss the pros & cons of each approach and how to find a good, recognized conference or journal. So let's start the discussion…..

1. Conference Proceedings

A conference is a recurring event often held annually and centered around a specific scientific field. Most of the conferences generally use the peer-reviewing process to select the papers. The quality of a conference will be measured using the acceptance rate. The top-ranked conferences often have an approximately 10% of acceptance rate. Most of the best conferences are hosted in partnership with IEEE or ACM. From these present, ACM conferences get higher recognition because of the quality of the peer-reviewing process. Present some conferences allows selected authors to publish the extended versions of their research studies in recognized journals as well. In my field (Computer Science) some top conferences are as follows and the acceptance rate of the following conferences is approximately 10%.

1. CVPR — IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
2. ICCV — IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision
3. NeurIPS — Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)
4. SIGKDD — ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
5. CCS — ACM Symposium on Computer and Communications Security

For choosing top conferences in computer science you can use the Guide2Research website and for other domains, WIKICFP shows all the upcoming conferences. Apart from these, you can find detailed information about the upcoming conferences from the sponsors' official web pages as well.

In conference proceedings first, you have to publish your initial article and after the peer-reviewing process, you will get an acceptance notification. This can be either accept or reject. After that, you have to register for the conference and have to submit your final camera-ready paper. Finally, at the conference event, you have to present your work. Normally when presenting your work there are two options. You can choose 15min oral presentation approach or either poster presentation approach.

Pros of Conference Proceedings

1. It provides higher visibility and impact to your research work.
2. You can interact with other researchers from your domain while in the conference event. Normally conferences have discussion sessions to exchange views on each other's research studies.
3. Have a fast review process.
4. Top conferences are supported and sponsored by leading companies in the domain. In computer science Nvidea, Google…etc.
5. Mainly focus on novel research contributions.

Cons of Conference Proceedings

1. Low acceptance rate.
2. Allow a limited number of pages — Upto 6–10 pages
3. Limited time and no second reviewing process. Thus the notification of the paper would be either reject or accept.
4. Sometimes you could get small, not descriptive feedback for your work from peer reviewers.

Most important tips for chose a quality conference

1. Check acceptance rate and its past events — From this, you can self-evaluate the quality of the conference.
2. Relevancy to your domain — Try to find out a conference that is most specific to your domain.
3. Check the sponsors and indexing servicers — It is good, the conference you chose is sponsored by IEEE or ACM and indexed in indexing services like Google Scholar, Scopus..etc.
4. Avoid predatory conferences — Predatory Conference List.
5. Get feedback from supervisors and seniors students who involve in researches.

2. Journal Publications

Journals are more standard than conferences because of their quality review process. Normally the peer-reviewing process of a journal could be conducted multiple times and it is more detailed when comparing to the conferences. Moreover, journals allow re-submit your article to peer-reviewing after revising your paper. Normally it takes two to three months to get the first feedback from a journal to your paper. In some cases, this may be six months to one year.

The quality of the journals is measured by the impact factor.

Calculating the Impact Factor of a Journal (https://www.manuscriptedit.com/scholar-hangout/good-impact-factor-journal/)

Springer, Elsevier, MPDI, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, IEEE, ACM could be identified as the top journal publishers. You can find the top 1000 journals in computer science and their sub-domains in Guide2Research we-page. Moreover, the IEEE Transaction journal series is recognized as the leading journal for computer science among the research community.

Top Journals in Computer Science (https://www.guide2research.com/journals/)

As same as the conference first you have to submit your article to the journal and after several peer-review rounds you will get first feedback for your paper. Rather than saying accepted or not, most of the time journal reviewers’ feedback show you what are the places that need to improve in your paper and you are able to revise and re-submit your paper to the journal. Journal will reject your paper if it is an extremely poor quality paper only.

When publishing your paper in a journal you can choose two options namely normal standard publication: The audience has to pay for the journal to download and read the full paper and open-access publications: Article can view without any purchasing (Article is publically available). However, the authors have to pay a certain amount of fee to get open access to the publication.

Pros of Journal Publications

1. Thoroughly peer-reviewed including multiple reviews — You can get deep, detailed reviews.
2. Quality and standard are high — Carry out deep analysis of the research with proper evidence.
3. Page count is high — Over 20 pages.
4. Give chance to revise the article and re-submit for the peer review process based on the comments.
5. Some universities give priority to journal articles when comparing to conference papers.

Cons of Journal Publications

1. The publication process is too slow- Due to this the research gap/solution could be outdated.
2. Selecting a good journal is hard — Present there are lots of predatory journals.

Most important tips for chose a recognized journal

1. Impact Factor
2. SJR (Scientific Journal Ranking)Journal Ranking — This is a world-recognized journal ranking method. There are 4 levels(Quartiles) named Q1, Q2, Q3 & Q4 where the Q1 journals are the best and also hard to get acceptance. Normally this shows the raking of the journal for its subject areas individually.

SJR Journal Ranking

3. Avoid predatory journals — If the selected journal is in this predatory journal list that means it is a bogus journal. Moreover, if the selected journal is in the Web of Science Master Journal List that means it is a good quality journal.

4. Check journals’ indexing servicers.

So these are my main points, which every student should consider when publishing their first research paper. What I want to emphasize in this article is that it is very important to choose a recognized conference or journal to publish your article. In order to improve connections between experts in your research field, it is best to deliver your research at a conference and participate in it.

In the next section, I will discuss some more tips which will help you in publishing an academic paper.

Some Important Tips

1. Manuscript Preparation

Manuscript preparation is a considerable part of academic paper submission. Most of the conferences and journals have their word templates. However, I noticed present most of the journals and conferences ask to use LaTex which is a high-level typesetting tool and their LaTex templates are available in the Overleaf platform.

2. Put your papers in arXiv

The arXiv is a repository for pre-prints. You can upload your unpublished or even not-accepted research works here and get feedback from the domain experts to improve them.

Here are some key guidelines for students who are about to publish their first research paper. These are based on my experiences and therefore can be biased. I hope this will help you guys to find and end up with a good research paper or a journal article publication.

Good Luck!

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