I love scientific conferences for meeting each other, and well, learning from those encounters. For, you barely get to learn anything new in those conferences. You truly learn by reading and studying. Scientific conferences are exactly that: marvelous opportunities for networking.

Lack of funding is certainly a limit. Traveling & accomodation requires money. I aim at continental (European) conferences as going overseas would cost me too much.

I love scientific conferences for meeting each other, and well, learning from those encounters. For, you barely get to learn anything new in those conferences. You truly learn by reading and studying. Scientific conferences are exactly that: marvelous opportunities for networking.

The presentations that you give and attend are likely to be frequented by researchers with similar interests, giving you the opportunity to discuss your research and learn valuable information from people working with similar techniques.

Scientific conferences are ideal places to find out what's hot in your field, observe the various debates under way, meet interesting people, make contacts for the future, and, in general, interact with professionals in your field

There’s also a tremendousvery important opportunity to run elbows with some of the scientists whose work you have admired. Those contacts may result in a new collaboration or even lead to a future postdoc opportunity.

Yes Carlos, networking is a cammon aim to join in conferences. Don't you think that sometimes it is hard to devide our short time for networking, workshops and presentations?

Dear Rolando, thank you for your valuable answer. Would you tell me how long is an ideal conference in your opinion? I mean, if organizers want to ensure enough time for everything. I often experience that organizers plan 2 or 3 days duration and invite many key notes while there is no chance to build new contacts.

Agree with you dear Agnes. But that is, so to speak, the thermodynamic cost of being a researcher/scientist. We ought to be as clever enough as not to diverge out time into small diversion.

Those conferences are aimed precisely at meeting, sharing - hence profiting our encounters as much as possible.

Yes Carlos, but conference organization is a thriving business which is directed by money. This is my real problem. Business seems to be more important in a congress than science is.

Dear Agnes, you are right. But the issue raised by the question concerns joining, i.e. participating in a scientific event. Organizing it is, I agree, quite different.

As to the second part, I would agree partially with you. Business, yipes!, is important. For instance publishing the proceedings, etc. And yet, if you have high scientific standards with the participants, the success is almost assured.

congress report is more easy than prepare peer-rewieved scientific paper. And score of congress report is low. Some congress are touristic and for meeting with colleagues and business. I enjoy congress but I can not to go a lot.

Conferences are useful coordination mechanisms for the scientific communities. They tend to rally experts in a particular scientific discipline from diverse place around the globe. Such gatherings represent great opportunities for the dissemination of knowledge and the progress made in various research themes. Thus, conferences are important for researchers, both doctoral researchers and professors. The former earn the opportunity to make their work known, while the latter capitalise on the opportunity to either entice talented doctoral researchers to join their teams after completing their PhDs, or engage in some collaborative work.

To answer the question, I would say that conferences may -at some point in time- have been the best practice to learn from each other, but at the present time, they are useful and provide a faster alternative for publishing to young researchers compared to journals.

Dear Mohamed, You are absolutely right. I am just worry about the combination of business and science. As I experience slowly slowly the business will be more important reason to organise scientific conferences. What do you think about it?

Dear Agnes,

I like small conferences (say workshops) but I also make use of large ones. For me (especially at really large conferences) the poster session is the most effective way to communicate, because there I can meet the authors, we can discuss the poster. The same applies to my poster contributions, people can find me and discuss my stuff if they are interested.

European Geosciences Union is testing PICO (interactive "poster, see http://www.egu2014.eu/pico.html), this year it was the second time this option was available. I am not enough good in preparing interactive material (neverthless this year I made a better PICO), but in many cases the authors did effort and it seems to work.

Best regards, Balázs

So, Dear Balazs, as I understand you well, you said conferences are the best and better than written publication.

I've never tried PICO but having some consern towards the conferences being changed to be business.

You know, many of events called scientific conferences are organized around the finance namely, scientific programming takes a back seat. I mean, the scientific programmes are concentrated into one-two days only among three-four duration and socio-cultural activities have given longer time than the science. This is my worry.

Dear Agnes, yes, you are right. As there are predatory journals, there are, unfortunately "predatory" conferences as well, and their number increases dramatically. Of course, in my previous post I have meant the REAL scientific conferences. Fortunately yet I could avoid the others, though it is not easy. Regards, Balázs

Well Balázs, its totally true but, while we have competence to check a scientific journal's parameters we have no chance to get similar information about a conference mainly before registering ourselves and arranging the payment. 

To avoid these kind of uncertainties that seems to be useful to never join in a new conference only traditional ones. How will this be solved???? The situation is in line with the publication at many predator journals.

Regs.

The scientific conferences may the best practice/platform to learn from each other but only for economically developed countries/researchers.

Workshops and seminars tend to be more beneficial than conferences.   The problem with conferences is lack of focus and their size as well as the practice of limiting conference presentations to a 15 to 20 minute format.    The shorter presentations are good from a conference organisers perspective because more talks can be squeezed into a narrow time window.  And the use large sizes of conference (many short talks and massive numbers of attendees) tend to inhibit interaction between attendees and speakers.

By contrast, workshops are usually focused covering a limited number of topics and have a small number of speakers that are allow 40 to 50 minutes for presentations.   And the number of attendees at workshops tend to be small.    The factors make it more possible and easier to exchange views with speakers and attendees.

The extreme case is represented by research seminars.    A research seminar is single topic-based and usually has one (possible two or three) speakers and lots of followup discussion.    This means that seminar tend to have greater focus than conferences and workshops.

A friend of mine once told me that he goes to conferences to meet friends.   By the same token, the motivation for going to workshops and seminars is to meet frends and learn about the cutting edge in some research area.

Dear Asmat, forgive me but do not understand what you mean "only for economically developed countries/researchers". Only they are able to go to conferences or they can learn from each other?????

Dear James, you are absolutely right but as I experience there are less time for workshops during a large conference than it would be necessary because of different social/cultural programmes. 

Dear Angnes,

Yes, I agree that workshops during conferences are hampered by timing constraints imposed by social and cultural programmes.    In considering workshops as stand-alone entities, I have found it worthwhile to travel across the planet to attend and participate a workshop that is independent of a conference.    Such workshops are less common than conferences but still held in various places for researchers to get together to share their ideas and experiences.    Such workshops provide an  excellent forum for graduate students (or even undergraduates) who accompany their supervisor.    Such  workshops borrow from the traditional fireside chat model (family and friends getting together to chat and to listen, perhaps contributing ideas and suggestions). 

Perhaps you have noticed or attended such workshops.   For example, here is the 2014 schedule for workshops posted by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute:

https://www.msri.org/web/msri/scientific/workshops

Do you know of other workshops and seminars in other subject areas?

Dear James, dear Colleagues,

I would like to raise three "issues" (if you like: a negative and two positive ones) as a reaction to James' comments above.

(A) Let me start with the negative one. The well-known phenomenon of  "evaluitis" (= unnecessary and repeated (re)evaluation of all (micro)elements of one's scientific performance) has reached the levels at some places (institutions, countries) that it is often questioned by a funding agency/evaluator whether participation at such (very fertile and excellent) workshops "made scientifically sense". I have observed already a case in which the application for funding already contained the option of participation at such a workshop; despite that the evaluator raised it as an issue...

To be more constructive I add  (IMHO) positive examples, too.

(B) I  attended already a few conferences whose organisating panels dared to schedule an excursion for the middle of the whole conference (say on Wednesday). This has several very positive effects:

1. The delegates have the possibility for some recreation so the second half of the conference is more effective.

2. Many contributions have been presented prior to the excursion; during that social event it is possible to discuss them in a more friendly, relaxed environment a whole day long.

3. Those whose contributions are scheduled for the second part of the conference  may have the opportunity to make some advertisement for themselves by contacting the potentially interested colleagues prior to their contributions and call their attention.

(C) Another alternative (and IMHO often informative) way of presentation (for smaller conferences) is the opportunity of "block presentation".  (We have tested that, it seems to work.). Numerous research groups are given say 1 hour-long blocks. These "blocks" are filled by the group members themselves and the organization of the presentation is up to the group members. The questions and discussion follows the whole block, so it is possible to spare some time as well. This way related topics/aspects can be presented together and can be discussed together as a bundle.

Kind regards,

Balázs

I think it is a good opportunity to meet some colleagues that could be useful in scientific research. It is good but we should be opened and sociable to discover new colleagues with good potential.

I agree with @Said that scientific conferences give us a chance to meet colleagues and equally to discover new promising colleagues.    

We all know that acceptable conference papers are on a fast track (in all cases, less 12 months before publication), compared with acceptable journal articles (usually more than 12 months and, in some cases, over 18 months).   This means we are more likely to encounter new talent sooner at conferences rather than new journal article authors.   The downside to this story is that reviewing at conferences tends to be very poor.  That means conferences are flooded with papers that would not ordinarily be considered for publication in a journal.

@James

Yes, you are right, many conferences are flooded with papers that would not ordinarily be considered for publication in a journal. But let's have a look on the possible reasons. My point here that is not that bad, in many cases.

Yes a possible reason could be, e.g., that Prof. Bighead presents the same stuff as he presented during the last 20 conferences. (BTW: I have the feeling that Prof. Bighead has typically no problem to sell the same for the 20th time in a journal.)

On the other hand I see other possible reasons that makes a conference contribution unacceptable as a journal paper, but it still could be useful/valuable:

1. The author is inexperienced (e.g., doctoral student) in writing.

2. There are linguistic problems.

3. The researcher could solve the problem only halfway seeking for partners (measurement results exist without theory or vice versa)

4. The results cover only a part of the possible cases (say samples from Europe, but not from South America), the dataset is incomplete.

5. The presentation is awful (bad organization in a poster, unacceptable visualization of the data, no experience in oral presentations)

6. I-want-to-present-all-my-stuff-in-one-talk problem (typically a problem of doctoral students)

etc.

Once I have seen a rather awful poster (out of my scope, but I knew colleagues who could be interested) but I could understand that the presented data was five times more as usual. Also the author was somewhat old and was not good in English. (I speak a little his language.) He complained that he had tried to publish that without much success. I asked him whether he would be interested in a cooperation with my colleagues, but he was somewhat afraid that the tediously collected data would be stolen (I guess he told me out of experience). I could assure him that this would not happen. Since then he is a co-convener of their own session in this topic making use of the database he collected.

Just a case history, but I have examples for all aforementioned cases. A good conference could be a beginning of much of good science. Important: science is NOT JUST PAPERS, but science cannot exist without papers.

Thanks for the comment and kind regards, Balázs