June 2023
 

Presenting at conferences is good for you!
 

In a recent preprint (not peer reviewed), Teplitskiy et al. explored whether attending “talks of interest” at conferences resulted in more citations of the conference papers over time compared with when they could not attend such talks because of scheduling conflicts at the conferences. They analyzed data on satisfaction and personalized schedules entered into a conference app by 2404 attendees at computer science conferences. They found that those who attended a talk of interest cited the presented research 52% more often than when they had a scheduling conflict and could not attend the talk.

Interestingly, this increase in citations did not seem to be affected by whether the attendees enjoyed the talk or not: talks they “liked” on the app saw a 52% increase in citations, while talks that they did not “like” saw a 51% increase. As the authors state, “Importantly, these strong presentation effects were observed even though all papers were easily available online.”

The authors discuss the clear benefits of researchers presenting at conferences in order to be cited later. They also highlight the importance of scheduling conference talks to reduce timeslot conflicts and maximize attendance.