This is part of a series on publishing (in academia and/or tech).
As I pack my bags and browse the conference program for this week’s 2025 SIGCSE Technical Symposium (kudos to GitHub Education, Google, and MongoDB for sponsoring this important event), I’ve been pondering the importance of conference proceedings to computing research.
As I have written previously, tech industry events and academic/professional conferences can vary greatly in conventions, format, limitations, and outputs. One big difference: academic and professional conferences privilege papers in a way that most tech industry events do not. And while some disciplines and professional organizations (e.g., the MLA) do not publish conference proceedings, many computing and engineering disciplines and professional organizations see them as critical vehicles for important research.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), for instance, states that
IEEE publishes more than 1,700 leading-edge conference proceedings every year, which are recognized by academia and industry worldwide as the most vital collection of consolidated published papers in electrical engineering, computer science, and related fields.
Likewise, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), also considers conference proceedings to be essential to the field, arguing that
Conference proceedings capture the cutting edge of innovation across the spectrum of computing fields by publishing refereed research findings and invited papers from ACM conferences, workshops and symposia. More than any other field, conferences are a vital publication venue in computing, where the most cutting edge research is presented and discussed. ACM and its Special Interest Groups convene more than 170 conferences, symposia and workshops each year. (emphasis mine)
It is worth noting that SIGCSE, which I mention above, is itself an ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) focusing on Computer Science Education. Other ACM SIGs range in focus from AI (SIGAI) to High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) to Design of Communication (SIGDOC), with many of the ACM’s affiliated 170+ events (and subsequent conference proceedings) orchestrated by SIGs.
While the contents of conference proceedings can vary, the published proceedings for the computing conferences I have attended include a variety of technical papers, sometimes with the papers per se paywalled, sometimes open access, and in almost all cases with abstracts freely available. Abstracts and session descriptions for other types of sessions that do not so easily lend themselves to written format are also often included: panels, poster sessions, workshops, lightning talks, birds of a feather sessions, etc.
At times conference proceedings are broken into multiple volumes. As an example, last year I participated in a working group at another ACM conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science (ITiCSE), the proceedings for which comprise three volumes:
- ITiCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1, published the week before the conference and including abstract and text for keynotes and most papers. While many require a login, some are open access, like this paper on “Like a Nesting Doll”: Analyzing Recursion Analogies Generated by CS Students Using Large Language Models
- ITiCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2, published the first day of the conference proper (July 8) and including abstracts for panels, poster sessions, and for the conferences working groups, including my own
- Because the bulk of the work performed by working groups happened during or after they met in person during a dedicated working session (July 5-7) before the conference proper began, the papers authored by the working groups were published in a subsequent volume, ITiCSE 2024: 2024 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, which dropped in January 2025 in order to allow time for writing, revision, and peer review. I am happy to note that the full text of my own working group’s research article, Instructors’ Perspectives on Capstone Courses in Computing Fields: A Mixed-Methods Study, is open access (no pay or auth walls)
Having engaged with computing conference proceedings as a researcher, reader, and–albeit to a lesser extent–presenter and author, there is a lot to like about the mix of peer-reviewed research papers, representations of different session types (panels, BoFs, etc.) that can never truly be captured on the page, and formats such as working group papers that take the conference events per se as part of their iterative inputs. Above all, to my mind it is vital that the conferences themselves allow folks to engage with the work of their peers, either just after that work has been published (as is the case with the SIGCSE Technical Symposium research papers) or as ideas and concepts are still works in progress (as is often the case with panels, lightning talks, etc.).
As such, I am delighted to be headed to SIGCSE this week. And if you are interested in the papers and session options before me this week, here are the conference proceedings (V.1 and V.2) for your review.
Disclosure: GitHub, Google, and MongoDB are currently RedMonk clients.
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