About Conference and Journal Rankings

There is an increasing trend for funding agencies like the EPSRC (UK), NSERC (Canada) and the ARC (Australia) to rank journals and even conferences. While accountability is an important objective of this process, it is not without difficulty. Tammilehto explains..

INNOVATION

True innovation often jumps discipline boundaries. In computing in the 1960's, biological metaphors were applied to adaptive machine learning and the results were genetic algorithms and neural networks. How would such pioneering ideas be treated now as an emergent field under these schemes?

NEW PARADIGMS

New ways of thinking give rise to new conferences and as a field grows it starts small and builds over time. A new conference series takes some years to establish, to a steady state of quality participants, to develop a culture of peer-review and to achieve a rating by way of paper acceptance rates.

FUNDING AGENCIES

Mostly, for the funding agencies, it's the conference track-record on acceptance rate that counts most. Big long-running international conferences with low acceptance rates, in the region of 10-20% of submitted papers accepted, usually find their way into the top tier rankings. In these fields - which are usually quite broad - there are well-established methodologies, often control datasets that allows results to be bench-marked and measured, and some well-known star performers. There are traditions or practice.

YOUTUBE

Experience shows that YouTube videos that present research ideas can have an impact well beyond. Our own experience indicates that a YouTube video can be viewed more than 300 times in the first week of release! How many of these visitors watch the video to the end is a matter for some debate, the number of comments is not a great indicator because most usually concern presentation as much as content. In another case, a YouTube video on a more esoteric research topic was viewed over 1000 times in a 3 month period. The point is that technology diffusion (or idea diffusion) is clearly dramatically magnified by social media outlets such as YouTube.



more to come..