Are journal papers better than conference papers?

Question

Are journal papers better than conference papers?

Answer 1

Why to prefer a conference

Here are some reasons.

    * Conferences have higher status. In part this is a historical artifact of the field of computer science, but it is self-perpetuating since that makes the best researchers want to send their papers to conferences rather than journals.

    * Conferences provide higher visibility and greater impact. Many people will attend your talk, you will have the opportunity to answer questions, and people will talk to both you and to one another in the hallways. Even disregarding the event itself, more non-attendees read conference proceedings than read journals.

    * Conferences have higher quality. Acceptance rates to good conferences are often around 10% (at least in software engineering, which is my field), whereas even the best journals are less selective. Naturally, there exist low-quality conferences (and journals), but if your c.v. is cluttered with them, then you will appear to be incapable of good work (even if the work you published in those venues really is good!), and your good publications will not stand out. A good rule of thumb is that the best conferences are sponsored by ACM.

    * Conferences are more timely. It can take years for a journal publication to appear (or even for reviews to come back), whereas the turnaround time for conference reviews is a few months, and the proceedings also appear quickly.

    * Conferences have higher standards of novelty. Journals often only require 20-30% of the material to be new, compared to an earlier conference version.

Why to prefer a journal

There are situations in which journal publication is desirable.

    * Journals may have longer page limits. If you have too many experimental results to fit in a conference publication, then a journal affords an opportunity to include them. You can also include proofs that are too long (or boring) for a shorter publication. A journal paper could recap or given an overview of an entire research area.

    * Journal reviews tend to be more detailed. A journal reviewer may spend days on a paper, whereas a conference reviewer cannot afford to do so for each of the dozens of papers he or she is assigned. This is in part because conference reviewers often believe the authors' claims (regarding a proof, for example), whereas journal reviewers are expected to verify them. It may also be in part because of the expectation that the paper will be re-submitted. In any event, the extra details can help you to improve your work or to understand its shortcomings.

    * Journals give the opportunity to revise your work and re-submit it for review. Actually, conferences give this too: if a paper is rejected from one conference, then you can revise based on the reviewers' comments and submit to a different conference, or the same one the next year.

    * Journals have higher acceptance rates, giving the opportunity to get your research published. The same is true of workshops. These are particularly good venues for people who are just starting their research careers.

    * Some lesser-ranked universities evaluate faculty on the basis of journal publications, because the Dean of Engineering is unable or unwilling to understand computer science. In most scientific fields, journals have higher standards than conferences; computer science is a rare exception. A top-ranked CS department can convince the dean to use the proper evaluation metric. A lower-ranked CS department cannot (the dean may think the department is trying to fool him or her). If you are at one of these universities, you will need to publish in journals, probably by submitting slightly revised versions of your conference papers to journals. The rush for people at lower-ranked universities (some of whom are excellent researchers, and some of whom are not) to submit even marginal results to journals is another regrettable factor that tends to lower the overall quality of journals.

Conclusion

it all depends upon who is publishing the the journal or who is conducting the conference

Answer 2

Yes, journal papers have gone through a more rigorous peer-review than conference papers.  While some conferences have peer-review, many will just publish whatever the authors submit.

Answer 3

I think it depends on how difficult it is to get a paper into either the conference or journal, and the respect of both venues have.

Answer 4

Yes. Journal papers have gone through a selection procedure.