Thursday, January 13, 2011

Difference between Symposium, Conference, WorkShop and Journal

1.       Symposium: A 'super-conference' of smaller conferences, e.g.: http://www.ieee-ssci.org/

a.       a meeting or conference for the public discussion of some topic especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations

 

2.       Conference: e.g. http://www.computelligence.org/sis/2007/

a.       one of the conferences as part of the symposium, above.

b.      Conferences are occasional or annual meetings organized by a committee, with a group of appointed paper reviewers who review submissions and select the most suitable, original, best etc. papers for publication in a book: 'conference proceedings'.

c.       Conferences are self-funded - i.e. people attend because they are interested in the conference subject matter. People who attend pay a registration fee, which provides for e.g. a printed book of proceedings for all registrants.

3.       Workshop:

a.       There are nominal differences between a workshop and a conference paper

b.      A workshop paper isn't technically a publication and is typically meant to represent work-in-progress

c.       Nowadays, workshops are typically very topically-focused and non necessarily any less quality than a conference paper

d.      That being said, I think it’s safe to say workshop papers are generally regarded as less prestigious than conference papers.

 

4.       Journal: e.g. one of Nature's publications, http://www.nature.com/ng/index.html

a.       Journals are usually peer-reviewed, which means your paper was carefully evaluated for errors and possibly rewritten a few times. It also could have been rejected. Conference papers (or proceedings) take whatever you send them if you participated in the conference. Journal articles (from peer-reviewed journals) are better.

3 comments:

  1. You have elaborated everything in a very good manner.

    Students at different stages can get at least an idea about the research.

    Prof. Dr. Asif Mahmood
    The University of Lahore

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks for the info, it clears some doubts

    ReplyDelete