ABSTRACT
The conference paper has been described as ‘the essential launching pad for nearly all scholarly careers’ (Gould, 1995, p. 37). According to Drott (1995), nearly half of the conference papers published in the sciences and the social sciences in the 1960s went on to become published papers – usually within two years or so. Similar results were reported in the field of medicine (see Weller, 2002). However, others have reported smaller proportions than this. Drott (1995), for example, found that only thirteen per cent of conference papers in information science were developed into publications, and Stolk et al. (2002) report that only thirty per cent of conference papers in medical contexts found themselves in print. More recently, conference papers can be found as preprints in some databases, and Schwartz and Kennicutt (2004) report that such papers were cited twice as frequently as those not posted.
