The effect of conferences on diffusion of scientific ideas

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Presenter

Misha Teplitskiy

Assistant Professor at the School of Information

Authors: Misha Teplitskiy, Soya Park, Neil Thompson, David Karger

Abstract

Many researchers devote substantial time to attending and presenting at conferences, often at hefty financial and environmental cost. Yet the benefits of conferencing for diffusing ideas is debated, particularly when the same ideas are available asynchronously online. Even less clear is which aspect of conferencing – short formal presentations or informal activities – is key for diffusion. Here, we measure the effect of short, in-person conference presentations on the spread of scientific ideas by leveraging a common, if annoying, occurrence: scheduling conflicts. Scheduling conflicts affect researchers’ opportunities to attend presentations in-person, but do not affect their ability to access the same content online asynchronously. We apply this identification strategy to data from conference scheduling software deployed at 22 computer science conferences, using which 2309 users marked ~100K presentations as being of interest. We find that having the opportunity to attend a presentation in person triples the probability of the user citing the paper in the following 2 years. Conferences vary widely in the extent to which their presentations have this “presentation” effect, with larger conferences having larger effects. The results provide evidence that in-person conferences achieve their primary goal of diffusing ideas, and are much more effective than asynchronous access to the same material.