Publishing your Research: Huinga Rangahau | Conferences

Attending a conference or seminar on your subject can be useful even if you're not ready to present. Conferences offer important networking opportunities, allowing you to meet peers and discuss your research with a wider group of your research community.

When you are ready, you might like to start with a graduate/postgraduate research symposium or smaller conferences, or co-present at a larger conference with a colleague or supervisor. Conferences and seminars can be a good place to present the preliminary results of your research and learn from feedback and discussions.

Conferences have different levels of esteem in different disciplines. In some disciplines, for example, Economics and Computer Science, conference papers are held in high regard as a publication. In other subject areas, conferences are seen as an interim step to share and develop a paper before publishing in another format (e.g. as a journal article or book chapter).
 

Presentations: an oral presentation without a written submission. Often you will have slides and an abstract. These may be uploaded to a conference website, but often the primary benefit of presentations is helping you gain feedback and develop an idea into a future publication.

Peer-reviewed published proceedings: some conferences will publish peer-reviewed proceedings, sometimes as a special issue in a journal or on a conference website. In some cases, the review will take place before the conference and all presenters will have an associated publication, in other cases a selection of presenters will have their paper selected to be published.

Conference papers: some conferences have an associated paper for all presentations that is not peer-reviewed. In some cases, this output may not have the same esteem as a proceeding, but it pays to confirm this if you are unsure. 

• Where is the conference? Is it online or in-person? Online conferences will be cheaper but don’t offer the same networking opportunities
• Is the conference theme/s a good fit for your research?
• Can you afford to attend? Check scholarships to attend or speaker discounts
• Use Think, Check, Attend to evaluate the legitimacy of the conference

Take note of any comments or feedback at the conference. If you wish to submit your paper to an academic journal, revise it according to conference discussions.

Check to see if the copyright for the published paper is assigned to the conference. You may wish to share the paper online or develop the paper into a further publication and may need to ask for permission.