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SKILL.md
Conference Proceedings Guide
A skill for finding, accessing, and citing conference papers and proceedings. In many fields -- especially computer science, engineering, and HCI -- conferences are the primary venue for publishing cutting-edge research. This guide covers major proceedings databases, search strategies, and citation practices.
Major Proceedings Databases
Database Overview
Database
Coverage
Access
ACM Digital Library
ACM conferences (CHI, SIGCOMM, KDD, etc.)
Institutional or ACM membership
IEEE Xplore
IEEE conferences (CVPR, ICRA, INFOCOM, etc.)
Institutional or IEEE membership
DBLP
CS bibliography, links to proceedings
Free metadata
Springer LNCS
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series
Institutional
AAAI Digital Library
AAAI, IJCAI proceedings
Free for AAAI papers
NeurIPS / ICML / ICLR
ML conference proceedings
OpenReview (free)
arXiv
Preprints including conference submissions
Free
Finding Conference Papers
Strategy 1 - Search by conference name:
Google Scholar: source:"NeurIPS" "transformer" "attention"
DBLP: Browse conference page -> search within proceedings
Strategy 2 - Search by topic across all venues:
OpenAlex: Filter by type "proceedings-article"
Google Scholar: Use keywords, then check venue names in results
Strategy 3 - Track specific conferences:
Bookmark the conference proceedings page (e.g., openreview.net)
Subscribe to DBLP RSS feeds for specific conference series
Follow conference Twitter/social media accounts for announcements
Navigating Conference Tiers
Understanding Conference Rankings
def assess_conference_quality(conference_name: str) -> dict:
"""
Framework for evaluating conference quality and reputation.
Args:
conference_name: Name or acronym of the conference
"""
indicators = {
"acceptance_rate": {
"top_tier": "< 25%",
"mid_tier": "25-40%",
"lower_tier": "> 40%",
"note": "Check conference website for historical rates"
},
"ranking_sources": [
"CORE Conference Ranking (core.edu.au)",
"CSRankings.org (CS-specific, based on publication counts)",
"Google Scholar Metrics (h5-index for venues)",
"CCF Ranking (Chinese Computer Federation, A/B/C tiers)"
],
"quality_signals": [
"Program committee reputation and size",
"Keynote speaker caliber",
"Longevity and consistency of the conference series",
"Whether proceedings are indexed in Scopus/WoS",
"Industry participation and sponsorship"
]
}
return indicators
Tiers vary by subfield. Always check the ranking relevant to your specific area.
Accessing Conference Papers
Free Access Strategies
1. Author homepages: Many researchers post preprints/camera-ready PDFs
2. arXiv: Conference-accepted papers are often on arXiv
3. OpenReview: NeurIPS, ICLR, and others host papers with reviews
4. Institutional repository: Check the authors' university repository
5. Conference website: Some conferences offer free proceedings
6. OpenAlex: Aggregates metadata and OA links from multiple sources
Workshop Papers vs. Main Conference
Workshop papers are shorter (4-8 pages), less rigorously reviewed, and represent more preliminary work. They are still citable but carry less weight. When citing, always distinguish:
# Main conference paper:
Author et al. "Title." In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024.
# Workshop paper:
Author et al. "Title." In Workshop on X at NeurIPS 2024.
Citing Conference Proceedings
BibTeX Format
@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
title = {Attention Is All You Need},
author = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki
and Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez,
Aidan N and Kaiser, Lukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
volume = {30},
year = {2017}
}
Common Mistakes in Conference Citations
Using @article instead of @inproceedings
Citing the arXiv preprint instead of the published proceedings version
Missing the conference name or year
Confusing the workshop name with the main conference name
Always use the official proceedings citation provided by the conference or digital library.
