What are conference proceedings? A guide, updated September 2026

After the closing ceremony, what happens to the knowledge exchanged, the arguments started, and the work presented at a scientific conference? The answer is its proceedings. Without them, an edition of the event exists only in the memory of the people who were in the room, and the debate goes into hiatus until the next one.

This guide covers what conference proceedings are, whether they count as publications, how they differ from a journal article, how Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar decide what to index, and what an organizing committee has to decide to publish proceedings that hold up.

What are conference proceedings?

Conference proceedings are the official published collection of the papers, abstracts, or posters presented at a scientific conference, congress, or symposium, gathered into one volume under the name and date of the event. They normally contain only the submissions approved by the scientific committee through peer review, which is what separates them from a programme or from a list of everything that was sent in.

Two things make them useful. They are a historical document of one edition of the event: the approved submissions and the discussion around them. And they are a snapshot of the state of the art in a field at a specific moment, which is what makes them worth consulting later.

In Portuguese and Spanish the same publication is called anais or actas. There is no technical difference. Proceedings is the English term.

What is the difference between a conference paper and conference proceedings?

The proceedings are the volume; a conference paper is one item inside it. When a researcher writes “published in the proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Congress of Chemical Engineering,” they mean one paper, with its own title, authors, and, if the edition registered them, its own DOI, inside the collection that carries the name of the event.

The label gets blurred in one place. Web of Science tags as “proceedings paper” some journal articles that started as conference presentations and were later adapted for a journal, often in a special issue devoted to the conference. A study of the Library and Information Science field found those articles to be about 9% of the field’s output, and the ones published in conference issues tended to be less comprehensive and to receive fewer citations than regular articles.¹ That is a journal publication with a conference origin, not the proceedings of the conference itself.

What goes into conference proceedings?

Full papers or abstracts?

The content depends on the organizing committee and the scientific committee. Proceedings can carry abstracts, extended abstracts, or the authors’ full papers.

Consider two real examples from conferences published on the Galoa proceedings platform. The 18th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA) published its proceedings online with the abstracts of the work presented. The 21st Brazilian Congress of Chemical Engineering (COBEQ) published proceedings with the option to download the full papers.

Everything presented, or a selection?

This is an editorial decision. At most conferences, everything effectively presented goes into the proceedings, which means the submissions that were approved but never presented are excluded.

Other conferences select a portion of the total. The 17th International Conference on Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR 2015) took that route, publishing a selection rather than the full set.

Do lectures and workshops count?

Any scientific production presented during the event can go into the proceedings. Posters and oral sessions are included in most cases; lectures, round tables, and short courses when the committee decides they belong in the record. The 6th Brazilian Conference on Natural Products (BCNP) published lecture content under a dedicated “Lectures” track, and the proceedings of the 14th Brazilian Congress of Family and Community Medicine (CBMFC) can be filtered by presentation format.

Conference proceedings vs journal article vs book chapter: what is the difference?

All three are scholarly publications. The differences are in who runs the review, when the work comes out, and which identifiers and indexes apply.

Preprints sit outside the table on purpose. A preprint is a manuscript made public before any peer review, so it is faster than all three and certified by none of them. Proceedings are the closest thing to a preprint’s speed that still carries review.

Do conference proceedings count as publications?

Yes. A paper in the proceedings of a peer-reviewed conference is a scholarly publication, and with a DOI it is as traceable and citable as any other. The question that actually matters is how much weight it carries, and each field has already answered that for itself.

Measured across all fields, proceedings account for roughly 2% of the references in the scientific literature, and they age faster than journal articles. But the average hides the fields where they are central: close to 20% of references in computer science and about 10% in engineering come from proceedings.² In computer science, papers in leading conferences match the citation impact of papers in mid-ranking journals and surpass the journals in the bottom half of the rankings,³ the field values conferences as a venue more than any other discipline does,⁴ and most computer scientists make their debut, publish more, and collaborate more in conferences than in journals, which makes proceedings a channel of their own rather than a step on the way to a journal.⁵

Proceedings in the sciences also show higher scholarly impact than proceedings in the social sciences and humanities,⁶ and bibliometric work treats proceedings literature as a data source in its own right precisely because its weight differs so much from field to field.⁷ In the life sciences the journal article still ranks higher. We make the longer argument for why that gap is a matter of function rather than quality in Proceedings are more relevant than you think.

For an organizer, whether your proceedings count is decided less by the label and more by four things you control: real peer review, stated publicly; a DOI per paper; complete metadata deposited where indexes read it; and open access, so the people who evaluate the work can reach it.

Are conference proceedings peer-reviewed?

In most scientific conferences, yes. Every submission goes to the scientific committee, researchers in the field judge it, and only the approved work enters the proceedings. That is peer review by the same logic a journal uses.

Two things differ. The review is shorter, because it has to fit between the close of the call for papers and the conference dates, and the committee works inside that window. And in many events the committee reviews an abstract rather than a full paper, which is a lighter judgement of the same work. Neither makes it less than peer review, but both need to be visible: a reader deciding whether to cite a proceedings paper, and an index deciding whether to cover the series, want to know which kind of review it was. Scopus, for instance, requires a serial title to consist of peer-reviewed content and to have a publicly available description of its peer review process before it will even evaluate it.⁸

If you are organizing, choose the type of peer review before the call opens, and print it in the call for papers: what is reviewed (abstract or paper), by how many reviewers, blind or open, and what the criteria are. It costs a paragraph and it is the paragraph an indexer reads first.

Are conference proceedings indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar?

Some are, and the three services decide in three different ways. None of them indexes a conference because it exists; each one checks whether the proceedings meet its own criteria.

Google Scholar does not evaluate titles. Its crawlers index scholarly content hosted on websites that meet its technical guidelines: each paper on its own page or in its own PDF, the title in large type at the top, the authors on a separate line below it, and a references section at the end. A site built that way is normally picked up within several weeks.⁹ Proceedings published as a single PDF of the whole volume, or behind a login, fail this test.

Crossref is not an index. It is the registry where the DOI and the metadata of each paper are deposited, and its API is what citation tools, reference managers, and many discovery services read. Crossref’s guidance for proceedings is to register a DOI for every paper, deposit the conference name, date, and location as event metadata, include abstracts and references, and, when the conference is ongoing, register the series under its ISSN.¹⁰ A paper registered this way is visible to every service that consumes Crossref, which is a much larger set than any one index.

Scopus decides through its Content Selection and Advisory Board. A one-off conference is assessed under the Engineering Village criteria; a proceedings series is suggested through the same serial title evaluation a journal goes through, which asks for an ISSN, peer-reviewed content with a public description of the process, a publication history, English titles and abstracts, and a convincing editorial policy.⁸ The series is then reviewed continuously.

Web of Science covers proceedings through the Conference Proceedings Citation Index, which its in-house editors curate: more than 321,000 conferences and 14 million records, with coverage starting in 1990.¹¹ Unlike Scopus, it evaluates proceedings volume by volume, against a set of 26 quality criteria, and only the publisher can submit a volume; an indexed earlier edition does not carry the next one in.¹³ The signals are still the same: a clear review process, editorial rigor, and complete metadata.

What Galoa can say about its own proceedings is this: every paper gets a permanent page in an open-access repository, the metadata is exposed over OAI-PMH for harvesters, Google Scholar crawls it, and the editions that contract DOI registration are deposited with Crossref. Whether a series enters Scopus, or a volume enters Web of Science, is a decision those services make, and the organizer’s part is to give them what they evaluate: a proceedings title that does not change between editions, an ISSN for the series, a published peer review policy, and abstracts in English.

Can the same paper be submitted to two conferences?

Usually not, and authors need a clear answer, because duplicate submission can end in an allegation of self-plagiarism. If you are an author and the submission rules do not say, ask the organizing committee before you send anything.

If you are organizing, the answer comes from your own editorial goals. In our experience with national and international conferences, most require that submissions be previously unpublished. Large congresses and symposia such as SLACAN (the Latin American Symposium on Food Science and Nutrition) and CIDESPORT (the International Congress on Port Performance) select the best submissions for publication in international journals, and they verify that the work is unpublished precisely to protect that route and the standing of the event.

How organizers verify it varies: a declaration from the author at submission, a form assigning publication rights to the event, or, in undergraduate research tracks, a letter from the advisor. Whichever you choose, state it in the call for papers, and decide it before the call opens, not after the first dispute.

How are conference proceedings published?

Proceedings used to be printed volumes, laid out much like journals, one fascicle per edition, hundreds of pages long. Then came CD-ROMs and USB drives handed out to attendees: lighter, easy to brand with the identity of the event, and easy to scratch or lose, which undercuts the point of distributing the work.

Publishing online solved the distribution problem. You share a link, and every attendee reaches the proceedings without the risk of losing the publication with a piece of hardware. If the proceedings are open access, the wider public reaches them too, which extends the reach of both the research and the event.

“Our motivation in making the proceedings available online and with a DOI was to increase reach and to let this work be retrieved and seen anywhere in the world. So that people could, as far as possible, assess the quality of what is presented here at UNICAMP.”

Prof. Dr. Fernando Coelho (Unicamp)

“Because this is a large-scale global event, with more than 93 countries involved and 2,500 submissions, publishing online is a practical way to disseminate the work and gives everyone easy access.”

WONCA organizing committee

Do conference proceedings need a DOI?

Depositing DOIs for the work in your proceedings is not mandatory. It is strongly recommended, and Crossref’s own guidance is to assign one to every paper, with an optional DOI for the volume and for the series.¹⁰

The DOI gives the paper a persistent identifier and a managed link. Files move, sites are rebuilt, and platforms are replaced; a DOI keeps resolving through all of that, provided its registered URL and metadata are kept current, and keeping them current is part of what a deposit service owes you. The conference can deposit under its own prefix, so the record is recognizable as yours.

Incomplete or inaccurate metadata reduces discoverability and breaks the connections indexing services rely on. Galoa has been a Crossref member and Sponsor since 2015 and an ORCID Institutional Member since 2025, which is how we make sure a proceedings deposit meets the standard and that authorship is attributed to the right person, not to a name that happens to look similar.

How to publish conference proceedings: what the organizer decides

Publishing proceedings that count is a sequence of decisions, and most of them have to be made before the call for papers opens, because the call is where authors and reviewers learn the rules. Here is the list.

1. What goes in. Abstracts, extended abstracts, or full papers; everything presented or a selection; posters and lectures or oral sessions only. State it in the call.
2. How it is reviewed. Which type of peer review, how many reviewers, what is reviewed, and the criteria. Publish the policy where an indexer can find it.
3. What the series is called. One title that does not change from edition to edition, a numbering scheme, and an ISSN for the series. Scopus evaluates the series; Web of Science evaluates each volume, and a stable series is what makes a volume legible to its editors.
4. Whether each paper gets a DOI. Decide it per edition, before publication, and make sure the deposit carries the event metadata, abstracts, and references.
5. Whether it is open access. Open by default is what gives the work its reach; if part of the collection must stay with members, decide which part.
6. Where it lives. A place where each paper has its own permanent page, the metadata is exposed to harvesters, and the committee can see access data per paper afterward.

If the committee wants those six decisions handled on one platform rather than assembled from parts, Galoa’s conference proceedings platform publishes each accepted paper in an open-access repository, connects authorship to ORCID, and registers Crossref DOIs for the editions that contract them; the public archive at proceedings.science already holds more than 165,000 papers from researchers in more than 178 nations, with editions going back to 1978.

Why do conference proceedings matter?

For the conference, publishing establishes the event in its field: each edition draws more people who want to take part, and the research reaches further than the room it was presented in. For authors, the proceedings are an additional channel of publication, and for many early-career researchers the first entry in a publication record. For everyone else, proceedings are a way into a subject, and how a researcher new to a field finds out what that field is currently arguing about.

The record only does this if it holds. A study of 123 conference papers found that 46% of the web addresses they cited no longer resolved, most of them returning a plain “page not found.”¹² That is what happens to any scholarly work that lives at a URL with no identifier behind it. The knowledge your conference produced deserves to outlive the closing ceremony, in a form the community can find, read, and cite, and that is a decision the organizing committee makes, not something that happens on its own.