Research findings are often presented at an early stage in the form of papers at one of the many national or international scientific conferences, congresses, symposia, workshops, etc. A conference is the place to present your on-going research, in order to get other people's views on the work. Conference papers can, therefore be a good way of finding out about current research. The papers from a conference are collected together and published as Conference Proceedings. Material presented at a conference is often published after amendments, as a journal article. Conferences often focus on research fields or trends within a given subject, providing an indication of what is currently considered to be of importance.
How do you find out about Forthcoming Conferences?
Very often you learn about coming conferences from colleagues or
supervisors. There are also special publications which list
future meetings:
Annual International Congress Calendar.
Brussels: Union of International Organisations, 1961-
4 issues per year.
This covers international conferences etc. in a multitude of
subject areas.
Forthcoming International and Technical Conferences
London: Aslib, 1954-
Published annually, with quarterly supplements.
Useful Internet resources for finding out about future conferences are:
Conference
Calender
Institute of Physics List
of Conferences
Calendars showing the dates of forthcoming conferences in physics can be found in a number of journals, for example :
There is considerable emphasis on locally arranged meetings. Information about future conferences in nuclear physics can be found in Meetings on Atomic Energy published by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This is published quarterly.
Published Conference Material
Conference material can be published both before
and after the actual conference.
Materials published prior to the meeting are called conference
preprints and can either be in the form of the
complete papers or a collection of abstracts. Sometimes these
preprints serve as material for discussion, sometimes they are
the final (and only) documentation from the meeting.
The final conference publication - the Proceedings - are published either at the conference itself or afterwards. They contain the papers given and, in some cases, discussions. Publication can, in some cases, take quite a time (up to one or two years). Many conferences are published either by the learned and professional societies or by commercial publishers. Many conferences do not result in published Proceedings. This causes problems, because references are made to papers given at meetings and these can be hard to identify and locate. For example, it is not always easy to obtain information on a "poster session" paper! One useful way to get hold of this type of information is to contact the author directly.
Example:
Proceedings of the American Power Conference. Chicago, 1952-1964.
Proceedings of the Physical Society. Journal of Physics B. Atomic
and Molecular Physics. London, 1968-1970.
Many conferences require an e-mail address from the authors,
so direct contact over the academic networks has become much
easier. Another possibility is to contact the conference
organisers.
Conference papers are also included in many of the general and
subject oriented abstract and index publications and databases.
Conference papers are also included in many of the general and
subject oriented abstract and index publications, such as Physics
Abstracts, and databases, such as INSPEC.
How to obtain Conference Papers
If you are trying to locate the holdings of a conference
proceedings, search under the place where it was held - like
Honolulu or Prague. This is far more significant than the title
"International Meeting on XYZ." Most university
libraries try to have the most relevant conference proceedings
for their users, but, as these are expensive, you might have to
acquire the material that you want as a photocopy through the
Interlibrary Loans Service.
One of the largest collections of conference papers in Europe is
at the British Library Document Supply Centre. Conferences
available can be identified either by the CD-ROM Inside
Conferences or the CD-ROM Boston Spa Conferences on
CD-ROM which contains records of some 320 000 published
conference proceedings held at BLDSC, from 1787 onwards. This
very large collection is available for loan or photocopy.
Finding conference papers can be difficult, but the BLDSC has
quite surprising resources. Chillag, 1994, points out that "the
BLDSC holds about twice as many papers from a high-energy physics
conference as its organizers will admit to exist!"
Examples in local library:
Proceesings of the symposium/workshop on spin snd symmetries:
Triumf, 1989. - 272.
Recombination of atomic ions proceedings. - New York, 1992. - 345.
International conference on Polarization Phenomena in Nuclear
Physics. - Paris, 1990. - 638.