Does the venue of scientific conferences leverage their impact? A large scale study on Computer Science conferences

Conferences bring scientists together and provide one of the most timely means for disseminating new ideas and cutting-edge works. The importance of conferences in many scientific areas is testified by quantitative indexes. The main goal of this paper is to investigate a novel research question: is there any correlation between the impact of scientific conferences and the venue where they took place?

To measure the impact of conferences, the authors conducted a large scale analysis on the bibliographic data extracted from 3,838 Computer Science conference series and over 2.5 million papers spanning more than 30 years of research. To quantify the “touristicity'' of a venue, the authors exploited indexes about the attractiveness of a venue from reports of the World Economic Forum, and have extracted four country-wide and two city-wide touristic indexes, which measure the attractiveness and the touristicity of any country or city.

The authors found out that the two aspects are related, and the correlation with conference impact is stronger when considering country-wide touristic indexes, achieving a correlation value of more than 0.5 when considering the average citations, and more than 0.8 when considering the total citations. Moreover the almost linear correlation with the Tourist Service Infrastructure index attests the specific importance of tourist/accommodation facilities in a given country.

There are two main limitations of this work: (1) the use of citations to evaluate the attractiveness of the conferences and (2) the difficulty to formally define the touristic attractiveness of a venue.

Starting from the results concerning the correlation between different touristicity indicators and the outcome of a conference in terms of citations, it would be possible to support conference organizers in their decisions. For instance, they could plan in advance conference venues considering the same touristicity indicators, comparing different options and selecting cities which have high scores. This will allow for rapid planning of a conference venue, encompassing the easiness of travel and the attractivity of a venue, hence increasing the potential outcomes of the conference.

Regarding the social implications, this study will enable the possibility for municipalities and conference organizers to understand what it can be improved in a specific venue to make it more attractive. This may include better transport connections or selecting cities which show a high potential regarding the touristicity index. Regarding the willingness of a researcher to submit a paper to a specific conference, it would be unaltered, meaning that what the results show is that there is already a mental process, before submitting a paper to a conference, which considers these indicators.

This is the first attempt to focus on the relationship of venue characteristics to conference papers. The results open up new possibilities, such as supporting conference organizers in their organization efforts.