CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS IN GEOSCIENCE JOURNALS: WHAT'S THE USE?

Conference proceedings serve a role in communicating current ideas, interim results, and completed studies to a broader audience than just the conference registrants. They are published as single volumes, parts of monographic series, on CD-ROMs, or on the Web. In some cases, they are published within journals. The value of these journal-published conference papers has been questioned, because 1) they may be considered less valuable than regular journal papers and 2) they increase the size of the journals and perhaps contribute to cost increases. These proceedings get distributed to a wide audience, but subscribers usually do not have a choice on whether they will receive and thereby pay for them. This issue still has relevance with the rise of electronic journal packages, because the price of the packages is often dependent on the price of the constituent journals. If conference proceedings are inflating journal prices, then they are probably inflating journal package prices too.

If conference papers have less long-term value than journal articles, then there should be a difference in their citation patterns. Eight years ago a preliminary study found no significant difference between the citation frequencies of conference papers and research articles that were published during the same year in the same geoscience journals. The study was limited because the data were slowly gathered through CD-ROM searches. The current study examined a larger set of geoscience journals and longer citation periods through searches of the Web of Science. Citation frequencies of conference papers in monographic proceedings were also collected. The results show whether conference papers in journals are used to the same extent as research journal articles or whether they fit expectations of lower use of proceedings papers.