4.3 Conference Proceedings

Conference proceedings are another type of scholarly publication that you may not have heard of before. Conferences are meetings of the members of scholarly and professional organizations. Some academic disciplines rely heavily on scholarly conferences as a means of quickly sharing and discussing new research and creative contributions by scholars in that subject area. Conferences are a major venue for scholarly conversations to take place. Conference presentations are typically research papers, powerpoint presentations, or posters presented by the researcher to an audience of peers and subject experts.

Scholars present their research at formal conferences to share their findings and ideas with other experts on the subject.

The presentation is often a paper, slides, or a poster that is read or explained to attendees.

After the conference, scholarly organizations compile the presentations and publish them. Traditionally, these are called proceedings.

Many scholarly organizations compile and publish all the presentations after the conference is over so that there is a lasting record of the research ideas that were shared at the event. These publications are often called conference proceedings. They will typically include the name of the sponsoring organization in the publication’s title. When you find a citation for a conference paper or presentation, you may also see a description such as “Paper presented at…,” which gives a clue that you’re looking at a conference proceedings citation.