<p>the content of your publication is what matters.</p>
<p>From /. :
“Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, ‘CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.’ Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)”</p>
<p>The reason why the paper is funny is because… no one gets it :)</p>
<p>It was generated software program that outputs random buzz words and phrases. Even the graphs are faked with random flowcharts and random labels. I’m sure they used some kind of markov chain thing to do this (we wrote a program to output legitimate sounding gibberish in one of my compsci classes).</p>
<p>The thing is, the paper got reviewed, and accepted into a conference, and the fake author was chosen as a session chair.</p>
<p>The suggestion here is that it doesn’t take anything to get a paper published. You can write about things that don’t even make sense and it might get accepted into a conference.</p>
<p>Problem is this would never fly in a journal. Additionally, the people who you publish with matters (as an undergrad, its expected that you will have respected co-authors)</p>
<p>The thing is, journals are published so often, and there are so many papers, there really is very little QA. Even journals themselves can be flawed.</p>
<p>I just read about the guy from Iran who submitted a randomly generated article to Applied Mathematics and Computation and it was accepted! Wow…!!</p>
<p>They must not read it at all. I can’t see the paper on the IEEE website, but I looked at another example from the generator website. It’s clearly absurd. So much funny stuff. Articles called “Deconstructing vacuum tubes.” and “Hash tables considered harmful” are both quoted among other absurdities. The graphs have quantities like latency labeled with the units written as being celsius. </p>
<p>In fact, I did a google search for that vacuum tubes line, and saw this:</p>
<p>I love the first sentence of that one: “The cyberinformatics solution to active networks [5] is defined not only by the analysis of RAID, but also by the essential need for vacuum tubes.”</p>
<p>The paper generator really seems to have a thing for vacuum tubes. lol</p>
<p>In first tier programs the only kind of publications that count for anything are A-list peer-reviewed journal articles. Conference papers are not really publications. They are an opportunity to workshop working papers on their way to (hopefully) becoming “real” publications. B-journals tend to have papers from researchers at less selective institutions and from already tenured faculty at selective institutions working on topics that interest them but are somehow secondary or out of fashion. T-T junior faculty at R1s will often not even bother to submit to B-journals, as it costs time and money and having your paper accepted probably won’t help and could even be considered harmful.</p>
<p>At major conferences the quality of the average paper can be quite low simply because of the volume. Papers in top peer-reviewed journals are frequently reviewed and revised a few times with two separate reviewers and an editor involved each time.</p>
<p>Grouping these generically under the heading “publications” is misleading.</p>
<p>There is a whole lot of complexity to the publication system that I am sure most of you will come to appreciate in the next year. There is more than just “conference papers” and “articles”. There is also a whole lot more than A or B list journals. Each journal is assigned an impact factor based on citations/citations in all journals. Some journals are higher impact like Science (impact factor 25) or Nature (impact factor 29) whereas there are also lower impact factor journals like (well take your pick <a href=“http://www.bio21.bas.bg/ibf/IF99.txt[/url]”>http://www.bio21.bas.bg/ibf/IF99.txt</a>). There is a spectrum of journal quality, not a bimodal distribution.</p>
<p>Ironically Science and Nature publications don’t imply a more scientifically sound result than some the lower (but still high) impact journals, see [The</a> fallibility of scientific journals | Publish and be wrong | The Economist](<a href=“http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658]The”>Publish and be wrong) . I remember my advisor once seeing a pretty famous researcher in our field having published a new Nature paper on some new results which were extremely impressive. He more or less quipped “yeah I wouldn’t trust anything that came out of that lab”.</p>
<p>I don’t think that conference papers are lower quality. It depends on the quality of conference. I know for example some of the well-regarded conferences in bioinformatics have only 10%-20% paper acceptance rate. After the conference, the papers are published in proceedings like Lecture Notes in Computer Science by good publisher like Springer. And bear in mind that conference is usually annual event, and each year only 20-30 papers are accepted. Journals are biweekly, monthly and quarterly.
Journal papers are not always higher quality. You have to look at the journal impact factor (IF), and there are only a handful of journals with IF above 5 which is considered the limit for good journal. Besides, the IF is only applicable to biomedical journals. For computer science and engineering fields, I don’t know any quality measure statistics.
Another observation is that biomedical researchers generally like to submit to journals where as CS/engineering researchers prefer conferences. So it is not correct to say that conference papers are inferior to journal papers.</p>
<p>“handful of journals with IF above 5 which is considered the limit for good journal”</p>
<p>It isn’t simply measure of quality. It is a measure of how widely applicable the information is. For instance, in Rheumatology, some of the most important journals have very low impact factors because they don’t have articles with mass appeal the way that biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology and so on would have.</p>