Conference proceedings

In academia, proceedings are the collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference. They are usually distributed as printed volumes or in electronic form either before the conference opens or after it has closed. Proceedings contain the contributions made by researchers at the conference. They are the written record of the work that is presented to fellow researchers. They may be considered as grey literature.

The collection of papers is organized by one or more persons, who form the editorial team. The quality of the papers is typically ensured by having external people read the papers before they are accepted in the proceedings. The level of quality control varies considerably from conference to conference: some have only a binary accept/reject decision, others go through more thorough feedback and revisions cycles (peer reviewing or refereeing). Depending on the level of the conference, this process can take up to a year. The editors decide about the composition of the proceedings, the order of the papers, and produce the preface and possibly other pieces of text. Although most changes in papers occur on basis of consensus between editors and authors, editors can also single-handedly make changes in papers.

Since the collection of papers comes from individual researchers, the character of proceedings is distinctly different from a textbook. Each paper typically is quite isolated from the other papers in the proceedings. Mostly there is no general argument leading from one contribution to the next. In some cases, the set of contributions is so coherent and high-quality that the editors of the proceedings may decide to further develop the proceedings into a textbook. This may even be a goal at the outset of the conference.

Proceedings are published in-house by the organizing institution of the conference or via an academic publisher. For example, the Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer take much of their input from proceedings. Increasingly, proceedings are published in electronic format via the internet or on CD.

In the sciences, the quality of publications in conference proceedings is usually not as high as that of international scientific journals. However, a number of full-fledged academic journals unconnected to particular conferences also use the word "proceedings" as part of their name, for example, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

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