{"id":61,"date":"2007-08-17T18:21:42","date_gmt":"2007-08-18T01:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/08\/17\/research-planet\/"},"modified":"2007-08-18T01:57:06","modified_gmt":"2007-08-18T08:57:06","slug":"research-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/08\/17\/research-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a new graduate student, one of the first things I learned was that the success of a researcher depends on the publish-or-perish<\/a> model. It’s not a perfect system, but the pressure to generate publications of truly novel ideas does tend to motivate cutting-edge research. The peer-review process also provides valuable objective feedback for researchers, and it usually prevents low-quality work from being published. As a result, publication frequency has become—for better or for worse—the primary method of judging a researcher’s status and ability.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the advent of the Internet, finding these publications has become a much simpler task. Spiders such as CiteSeer<\/a> and Google Scholar<\/a>, as well as publisher databases from IEEE<\/a> and Springer<\/a>, can find relevant publications with a simple keyword search. Some sites even offer vital statistics, such as the number of times a paper has been cited, to help judge the importance of the work. These tools are an enormous help when researching a topic.<\/p>\n

But what happens when the research is done and it’s time to publish your own work? Surprisingly, finding a relevant conference or journal is often more difficult than finding a relevant publication. Searching the web can help, but you might overlook new or esoteric venues. For a more comprehensive search, professional organizations provide complete lists of the conferences they sponsor, but these too are limited. For instance, the ACM conference database<\/a> doesn’t list IEEE events, while the IEEE database<\/a> doesn’t list ACM events. And neither web site has any knowledge about conferences outside of their respective fields.<\/p>\n

Making matters worse, some conferences have been accused of being “fake,” lacking any form of peer review and accepting all submissions (even randomly-generated papers<\/a>) simply to make a profit. Journals, too, have been known to spam researchers with offers to publish<\/a> in exchange for a fee. Given the key role that conferences and journals play in the integrity of research, these trends are disturbing.<\/p>\n

After several years of dealing with these issues, always feeling a bit in the dark when it came to keeping track of research venues, I finally decided to do something about it: I created Research Planet<\/a>, an independent, cross-discipline source of information about conferences and journals. Designed to make the life of a researcher easier, it offers:<\/p>\n