As a student in a traditional condensed matter physics group, I was taught for many years that for every conference you visit, you write an article for the proceedings. In my experience it was mainly seen as a gesture to the organizers and to the community. Several times I have responded to the request of organizations like SPIE to contribute a 10-page article to a conference. In later years I was surprised to find out that this attitude toward proceedings is not shared among all researchers. So what is the role of conference proceedings in the present scientific system, should we write them, are they a waste of time, or are they perhaps worse than that?

Why proceedings may be useful
Conference proceedings have fulfilled several useful functions in the past. A conference volume provided a sense of community; by contributing one is acknowledged as an active member of the field. Conference volumes were distributed among the community in hardcopy, in which case they provided reference material for workers in the field. Thus it was an effective way of addressing the relevant people. Proceedings were a way of getting one’s work known in the community before major results were published in a peer reviewed paper. Finally, proceedings can be used to provide background information or to present data which would otherwise not be published elsewhere.

The other day I met a professor from a pretty good department and he said something along the lines of “of course the h-index is not important but it is funny that all the hires we have made over the years had a normalised h-index of 1 or above and when they didn’t, questions were asked”. So the conclusion really is that to be hired you need a normalised h-index greater or equal than 1.

What’s this all about? First the h-index, in case you have been in the bush and haven’t heard about it yet. There’s good explanation on the wiki page on the h-index. Briefly, if you order your publications by the number of citations in decreasing order and index them 1,2,3, etc., when the index becomes equal to the number of citations, you have found your h-index. Thus, an h-index of 10 means that you have 10 papers with 10 citations or more. It filters for outliers such as one paper with a 1000 citations. The normalised h-index (hbar?) is the h-index divided by the number of years that have passed since your first publication. Supposedly (I can’t find where I read this now), an h-index of 20 when you have been in your career for 20 years qualifies you to become a full professor.