Conference Proceedings Guide

A skill for finding, accessing, and citing conference papers and proceedings. In many fields -- especially computer science, engineering, and HCI -- conferences are the primary venue for publishing cutting-edge research. This guide covers major proceedings databases, search strategies, and citation practices.

Major Proceedings Databases

Database Overview

Database	Coverage	Access
ACM Digital Library	ACM conferences (CHI, SIGCOMM, KDD, etc.)	Institutional or ACM membership
IEEE Xplore	IEEE conferences (CVPR, ICRA, INFOCOM, etc.)	Institutional or IEEE membership
DBLP	CS bibliography, links to proceedings	Free metadata
Springer LNCS	Lecture Notes in Computer Science series	Institutional
AAAI Digital Library	AAAI, IJCAI proceedings	Free for AAAI papers
NeurIPS / ICML / ICLR	ML conference proceedings	OpenReview (free)
arXiv	Preprints including conference submissions	Free

Finding Conference Papers

Strategy 1 - Search by conference name:
  Google Scholar: source:"NeurIPS" "transformer" "attention"
  DBLP: Browse conference page -> search within proceedings

Strategy 2 - Search by topic across all venues:
  OpenAlex: Filter by type "proceedings-article"
  Google Scholar: Use keywords, then check venue names in results

Strategy 3 - Track specific conferences:
  Bookmark the conference proceedings page (e.g., openreview.net)
  Subscribe to DBLP RSS feeds for specific conference series
  Follow conference Twitter/social media accounts for announcements

Navigating Conference Tiers

Understanding Conference Rankings

def assess_conference_quality(conference_name: str) -> dict:
    """
    Framework for evaluating conference quality and reputation.

    Args:
        conference_name: Name or acronym of the conference
    """
    indicators = {
        "acceptance_rate": {
            "top_tier": "< 25%",
            "mid_tier": "25-40%",
            "lower_tier": "> 40%",
            "note": "Check conference website for historical rates"
        },
        "ranking_sources": [
            "CORE Conference Ranking (core.edu.au)",
            "CSRankings.org (CS-specific, based on publication counts)",
            "Google Scholar Metrics (h5-index for venues)",
            "CCF Ranking (Chinese Computer Federation, A/B/C tiers)"
        ],
        "quality_signals": [
            "Program committee reputation and size",
            "Keynote speaker caliber",
            "Longevity and consistency of the conference series",
            "Whether proceedings are indexed in Scopus/WoS",
            "Industry participation and sponsorship"
        ]
    }
    return indicators

Major CS Conference Tiers (Illustrative)

Tier A* (Top):  ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ACL, SIGCOMM, OSDI, CHI, KDD
Tier A:         AAAI, ECCV, EMNLP, ICSE, WWW, CIKM, ICDM
Tier B:         COLING, WACV, ICSME, PAKDD, AISTATS

Tiers vary by subfield. Always check the ranking relevant to your specific area.

Accessing Conference Papers

Free Access Strategies

1. Author homepages: Many researchers post preprints/camera-ready PDFs
2. arXiv: Conference-accepted papers are often on arXiv
3. OpenReview: NeurIPS, ICLR, and others host papers with reviews
4. Institutional repository: Check the authors' university repository
5. Conference website: Some conferences offer free proceedings
6. OpenAlex: Aggregates metadata and OA links from multiple sources

Workshop Papers vs. Main Conference

Workshop papers are shorter (4-8 pages), less rigorously reviewed, and represent more preliminary work. They are still citable but carry less weight. When citing, always distinguish:

# Main conference paper:
Author et al. "Title." In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024.

# Workshop paper:
Author et al. "Title." In Workshop on X at NeurIPS 2024.

Citing Conference Proceedings

BibTeX Format

@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
  title     = {Attention Is All You Need},
  author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki
               and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez,
               Aidan N and Kaiser, Lukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume    = {30},
  year      = {2017}
}

Common Mistakes in Conference Citations

• Using @article instead of @inproceedings
• Citing the arXiv preprint instead of the published proceedings version
• Missing the conference name or year
• Confusing the workshop name with the main conference name

Always use the official proceedings citation provided by the conference or digital library.