AS: Who benefits the most from presenting at conferences? It looks like junior researchers and those at less prestigious institutions get a greater conference bump.
The Role of Conferences on the Pathway to Academic Impact: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Fernanda L. L. de Leon by University of Kent, Canterbury and Ben McQuillin, University of East Anglia (UEA)
October 9, 2014
Abstract:
This paper provides evidence for the role of conferences in generating visibility for academic work, using a ‘natural experiment’: the last-minute cancellation — due to ‘Hurricane Isaac’ — of the 2012 American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting. We assembled a dataset containing outcomes of 15,624 articles scheduled to be presented between 2009 and 2012 at the APSA meetings or at a comparator annual conference (that of the Midwest Political Science Association). Our estimates are quantified in difference-in-differences analyses: first using the comparator meetings as a control, then exploiting heterogeneity in a measure of session attendance, within the APSA meetings. We observe significant ‘conference effects’: on average, articles gain 17-26 downloads in the 15 months after being presented in a conference. The effects are larger for papers authored by scholars affiliated to lower tier universities and scholars in the early stages of their career. Our findings are robust to several tests.
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