I suspect that full-paper submission is a good low-pass filter, catching and eliminating those who are not as prepared to present. I would certainly agree that I have seen some excellent papers presented at the AIR conferences, and that's the reason I keep coming back. But I also sympathize with Barry and others: there have been some real dogs presented. I won't exclude some of my own presentations from the canine group. There is no reason a move toward full papers would need to be drastic. In future years, a call could be made for both full papers and abstracts, the former as part of a special track that would also be appealing to publishing arrangements with some of the journals who have been supporters of research by AIR attendees in the past. This would allow for the organization to "try out" full papers, without requiring an immediate ramping up of reviewers or process. Alex On 4/26/07, Mia Consalvo <consalvo@ohio.edu> wrote:
Thanks Jeremy :).
In response to the discussion about submitting abstracts versus papers, there are of course disciplines that do both well, but one of our biggest challenges is our inter-disciplinary nature. One of the reviewers this year made a great suggestion- that when submitting abstracts have the authors include, perhaps as a keyword, their disciplinary affiliation. And on the flipside, potential reviewers would also list their disciplinary affiliations so that we could try to match at least one reviewer from the discipline to the abstract.
We also, unfortunately, must sometimes assign reviewers abstracts outside of their areas of expertise, or simply see the abstract go un-reviewed. The solution there is of course to have more reviewers-- which is a challenge from year to year.
I'd be in favor of having full papers for future conferences, but I will agree with Ted and some others that I do go to conferences that review full papers only, and it is NOT a guarantee of quality. I'd stack AoIR's quality against any other conference, and I think we'd win many times.
Mia
-- Mia Consalvo, Associate Professor Director of Graduate Studies 213 RTV Building School of Telecommunications 9 South College Street Ohio University Athens, OH 45701
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