Fading the distinction: A Conference or a Journal ?

Why to publish in a conference ?

Being a newbie in the computer science domain you should choose to publish in a conference because of some reasons listed below:

• Conferences intend to provide higher visibility and impact at somewhat greater extent. 
• As we can experience from the past that most of the good researchers / inventors favor the choice to get the research work published in a conference or we can say, a high impact conference. 
• While attending a conference you will get an opportunity to talk with other researchers / scholars from your domain and answer their queries regarding your work. 
• Even if you are going to publish your good work in a low quality conference or journal, you are going to be considered as a bogus author. If, you are still finding for a rule to recognize best quality conferences you can consider the conferences sponsored by some associations like ACM, IEEE, IJORCS, SPRINGER etc. 
• Conferences have higher status, mainly those which are connected with some journals of International repute like JCSS-Elsevier, IJORCS -White Globe, JCST-Springer. 
• Conferences do work in timely fashion as they have to publish the research work at a specific time. But, in a journal, it can take years for a journal publication to appear (or even for reviews to come back, if they follow a strict double-blind peer-review process like IJORCS). On the other hand, the turnaround time for conference reviews is extended just for few months, and the proceedings may also appear more quickly. 
• Conferences generally have higher standards of novelty. Journals often only require 20-30% of the material to be new when compared to an earlier conference version of the paper. 

Why to publish in a journal ?

Considering the case of a journal, publishing the research work is desirable in the following situations:

• Journals normally have longer page limits defined. This can be really beneficial if you have done an extended research work which could cover a larger number of pages. 
• In a journal, you can also include some results that are too long (or boring) to be displayed in a shorter publication such as a conference. In short, your research paper published in a journal could describe your entire research area in a proper way. 
• Journals are better when you think of finding the shortcomings of your research work and get it revised. You can then resubmit it to the editorial or review board to get it accepted or to continue the review cycle again. This scenario can also be used with the help of conferences, when a paper gets rejected by one conference, you can check the comments in the review report provided and ultimately improve your manuscript ending with a submission in a new journal same year. 
• A journal can be very helpful to you if you want to publish your series of results periodically, as this helps you to spread more awareness about your research by publishing into journals of different continents saving lots of time (which would have been used by you to present your research in different parts of world) and gathering recognition for your work on a broader prospective. 
• You always have a better chance of tracking your research paper in terms of citations, number of reads etc when published in a journal as many conferences are not indexed at a good level as compared to the research work published in a Journal. 

Same article, if two reviewed by two journals of same scope may not yield to the same result, but a journal acceptance for your research paper is always a seal of approval which states that the research findings displayed by you is capable of getting published as it has been evaluated by a group of reviewers (for peer reviewed journals) having some level of expertise in that specific domain. Moreover many times journal publications are considered as a hall ticket in appearing for some good opportunities in research or academic field. Below can be some additional advantages of publishing in journal. 

1. A broader outreach, i.e. providing a worldwide readership to your research work.
2. Key articles highlighted with linked editorials, commentaries and/or press releases 
3. Money - A share of significant commercial reprint revenue from your research. This is being followed by some journals like BMJ Journals

Contributed By: Gursharan Singh, Hasmeet Singh