I can't speak for every field, but at least for my own field of information systems, where conferences count for zero, at least among the most research-intensive universities:

Counting conference publications or not is in no way a judgment either way of the quality of the papers. In information systems, it is well known that some high-quality conferences (such as ICIS, HICSS and AoM-OCIS) regularly field higher quality papers than many journals. However, such publication often counted as zero in promotion and tenure considerations.

What is going on is that in our field (and I suspect also in similar fields) *conferences are not considered terminal publication outlets--only journals are*. That is, when you present a paper in a conference, even when it is published in the proceedings, you are expected to later publish a significantly revised and significantly extended version of that paper in a journal article (and I would guess that in 90% of the time, this is what happens, at least for high-quality papers). A high-quality conference paper is expected to yield a high-quality journal article. Thus, *to avoid double-counting*, conference publications are ignored in promotion and tenure considerations.

From what I understand, in fields like computer science where conferences are terminal publication outlets (that is, conference papers are often not republished in journals), then it naturally makes sense that the conference papers should be considered the measure of a researcher's productive quality.

~ Chitu

Aaron Halfaker a écrit :

As for disciplines that do not count conference papers, I cannot comment because my discipline (Computer Science) looks at top tier conference publications in a similar way to journal publications. However, I'd argue that anyone who does not value a publication purely because the venue is called a "conference" regardless of the impact/restrictiveness is making a mistake. I've seen people include the acceptance rates on their CV to avoid this situation.

-Aaron