I stumbled over this discussion when being confronted once again with ResearchGate (RG) attempting to list my conference abstracts as "Article" in my profile. I find this highly misleading and have been manually deleting such listing from my profile, often too late, as I had already received reprint requests for an "Article" which was nothing else than a conference abstract. While these may and should be considered publications (as long as they have been "published"), I would certainly not class an abstract as a paper or "Article", peer-reviewed or not. Some extended abstracts published in conference proceedings come close or are even equivalent to articles in a conventional journal, and it should be the author's call to label it a conference abstract, or article. However, they may be a reason why the conference organisers call them "Extended Abstract" and not "Conference Paper", which probably reflects the expections wrt. length and completeness.

Unfortunately, RG does not give us the choice of labelling our publications, so I will have to continue deleting my conference abstracts that are wrongly labelled as "Article". I believe that RG should either introduce consistent labelling and definitions of their lables (e.g. "Article", "Abstract", "Book chapter", maybe with sub-label "peer-reviewed") or allow re-labelling ourselves. I do think that is is a pity not to be able to list our conference abstracts in a transparent way, allowing clear distinction between complete articles and conference abstracts or even conference posters and talks converted to pdf.

Anything published anywhere is a publication, what matters is peer-reviewed publications that is considered by peers as an important source of information. Generally all institutes and bodies define the measures of scientific or academic impact of staff and accordingly abstract publications might be considered or not.

It is better to put some more content in the conference papers and get that published if the conference organizers don't publish those papers. Many conference presentations. The paper is written short which might be suitable for the conference but for the research paper need more thoughtful writing.

http://internationaljournalofresearch.com/call-for-paper/special-issue-proposal/

I aggree, everithing published is publication, even the abstract of conference publications, especially if they are published in indexed peer reviewed journals. But it depence on many factors how it will be evaluated (i. e. the purpose of valuation - for ranking for research projects or for academic habilitations, the subject field, the country and it's politics of research work...).

I aggree, everithing published is publication, even the abstract of conference publications, especially if they are published in indexed peer reviewed journals. But it depence on many factors how it will be evaluated (i. e. the purpose of valuation - for ranking for research projects or for academic habilitations, the subject field, the country and it's politics of research work...).

In one word, no. Abstracts are not peer-reviewed publications, and don't contain enough information to be evaluated as such.

Some people include abstracts in their lists of publications, others don't. I am one of the latter.

Yes, but may be limited to conference abstracts with a robust scientific structure (e.g., background, objectives, methods, results, conclusion).

Authors and Institutions must be considered as well.

In addition, take in account that many indexed journals provide a peer review process also to abstracts and other kind of short publications. 

After all, common sense must guide the decision to include or not data from a conference abstract.

Regards

I stumbled over this discussion when being confronted once again with ResearchGate (RG) attempting to list my conference abstracts as "Article" in my profile. I find this highly misleading and have been manually deleting such listing from my profile, often too late, as I had already received reprint requests for an "Article" which was nothing else than a conference abstract. While these may and should be considered publications (as long as they have been "published"), I would certainly not class an abstract as a paper or "Article", peer-reviewed or not. Some extended abstracts published in conference proceedings come close or are even equivalent to articles in a conventional journal, and it should be the author's call to label it a conference abstract, or article. However, they may be a reason why the conference organisers call them "Extended Abstract" and not "Conference Paper", which probably reflects the expections wrt. length and completeness.

Unfortunately, RG does not give us the choice of labelling our publications, so I will have to continue deleting my conference abstracts that are wrongly labelled as "Article". I believe that RG should either introduce consistent labelling and definitions of their lables (e.g. "Article", "Abstract", "Book chapter", maybe with sub-label "peer-reviewed") or allow re-labelling ourselves. I do think that is is a pity not to be able to list our conference abstracts in a transparent way, allowing clear distinction between complete articles and conference abstracts or even conference posters and talks converted to pdf.

Abstracts are of two types one is indicative and another is informative, while going through the indicative abstract one gets the idea whether one should go for the entire publication or not, however after going through the informative abstract, most of the reader get best out of it, as such abstract serves the purpose without going through the publication in its eternity.  by and large abstract is not considered as a publication, however if it is informative and serves the purpose to that of any complete publication could be considered as publication, provided the same has not been published elsewhere as full or modified paper.

Ramesh:  How have you arrived at this distinction? 

Pretty much every journal & conference I have come across has a simple abstract requirement of between 250-500 words.  Abstracts are designed to give a reader a brief idea (structured or unstructured) of what the work is about - nothing more. 

Published Papers:  In the context of published PAPERS, this mainly lets you decide whether the article is worth reading.  This type of abstract is of little informational value, as it does not have enough data/context to make it reliable or robust. For this reason, we teach students to read whole papers, not just abstracts. You also do not have journals solely publishing abstracts (apart from conference listings), so this says that abstracts are not to be considered a publication, due to their limited ability to transfer reliable knowledge.

Conference Abstracts:  IMO, there is hardly ever such thing as a 'Conference Paper'.  At conferences, we commonly disseminate knowledge by either Oral Presentation, Poster Presentation, or Workshop/Parallel Session.  They are presentations/contributions & there is no requirement to write or distribute a written paper, although some Oral Presentations are given full transcript/paper coverage in the conference proceedings.  There is usually only the abstract (sometimes only the title) provided in the indexed journal & you presented the work to the conference, not the journal.  Therefore this also indicates that it is not a publication, given that there is no depth of knowledge dissemination.

Value:  Conference contributions should be valued in their own right & not as a 'second class publication'.  They indicate you actively participate in peer activities, something that is taken as part of professional practice, but not everyone does.  On you CV, some countries have a system where you classify your outputs (book, p-r journal, conference contribution, national, international, etc.) - see attachment for an example from Finland.  Unfortunately however, value is often measured by perceived 'impact', so many still look at publication as a sign of their ability (not vanity, but driven by social comparison & theories of reasoned action).

I also have a couple of conference contributions listed here on RG under the IF of the journal that published the abstract.  I agree with Jesus/Stanislaus that it is 'incorrect' & it would be more accurate if RG had a system that allowed more accurate representation.  However, things even themselves out:  my last 'article' was a conference poster. The event was one of the most prestigious European conferences in the field but normally, my activity wouldn't receive any recognition, despite me displaying & presenting the poster for 4 consecutive days, conducting research during the conference & having a related 2 page article in their scientific magazine.  The journal that 'published' the abstract had an IF of 4.something but the magazine has no IF, despite it being just as widely disseminated throughout Europe.  For my CV, it makes no difference - it is 'just' a conference contribution.  Here on RG however, the extra 4.something IF points gives an indication that I did something 'worthwhile'...  If people want the article, I give them a copy of the poster & the magazine article  :-)

Dear Mr. Jesus Cortes

As far as my knowledge is concerned, Conference Abstracts should not be considered on par with research paper.

An abstract of a conference in a published journal should be given significance . There is a screening process by the conference scientific committee  to decide the quality of the abstract & it can be rejected , if it is not significant . Presentation in a conference by the authors  , to the peers & the subsequent discussions are a very relevant part of the conference .

  RG has given us the option of writing a detailed article & attach it as a dataset supplement to the abstract . In the era of open science , it is up to the reader to decide the relevance of the paper . If the abstracts are not relevant , then peer reviewed journals should not publish them & should be made available only  as conference abstracts of the concerned scientific committee.

I have a problem with abstracts full stop. By nature, they are constrained & cannot give a robust depth of information that will support or test the issue at hand.  Especially for larger conferences, I would prefer it that people were required to submit full papers for oral presentations, & a poster & short paper for poster presentations. The full accepted material can be housed on-line & made accessible to many more people than just those who attend the conference. The journals which publish the abstracts can then provide a link to the full work.  This would be much more useful & get away from the state of thousands of 'abstracts' at big meetings, but little sense of value amongst the community.

Different scientific communities use different avenues for collaboration and dissemination of results. In some communities, the standard way is to submit a (real) paper to a conference, and then present and discuss the peer-reviewed and accepted paper at the conference. Other communities use the standard journal pathway for publishing peer-reviewed science, while taking advantage of conferences for quick communication and face-to-face discussion of ideas and preliminary results.There are many more, e.g. they Physics community using ArXiv etc.

Therefore I've been advocating to let each scientist pick correct labels for their contributions in RG, e.g. peer-reviewed, article, conference abstract, conference proceedings paper etc. I don't think it makes sense to look for a one-scheme-fits-all solution, while each researcher him or herself knows best what each contribution entails. I still find it annoying and misleading that RG labels conference abstracts as papers without allowing me to re-label them correctly. All I can do is to remove them altogether.

For medical filed, adding abstracts to the profile overestimate research achievements and it is misleading the audience. Moreover most of the medical journals publishing abstract in their supplements have high IF,  but it is not the same as publishing full text pre review journals with the same IF.

UPDATE: We can now edit all details of our entries in the publications list. Just click on the title, then on "EDIT" and choose the appropriate publication type, e.g. "conference paper" instead of "article". Thanks to RG staff for finally enabling us to correct wrong entries!

I thought we should not consider abstracts as publications, but I am amused about what is acceptable in many disciplines!

Why is it, that as an abstract is by definition a summary of something larger, that conferences accept / publish them in the first place?  Why not ask for full papers, full posters etc, then host them on-line?  At least that way there would be a proper work available.  I add conference 'publications' to my CV, but I have never just presented an abstract - even with posters, there is the poster itself & often a handout / supporting paper.  It might not show any peer-reviewed rigor, but I think it gives an indication of how I interact at national / international levels.  For all 'professionals', I feel it is an important area of practice which is overlooked.

Interesting discussion.  I think the "Conference paper" category is not useful for an abstract.  For some conferences an abstract may lead to a publication in a conference proceedings and I would call that a "conference paper". In other cases the abstract is all there is.  If folks want to honestly list them on RG then there is no way to do it.  The result is that many investigators call an abstract a conference paper.

The extent of abstract peer review varies dramatically from local to regional, to national or international meetings and also from field to field.  In my field for example it  is rare for an abstract to be rejected.  I presume that this is not the case for others?

I think we need an "abstract" category.

Abstract peer review has been discussed in literature for a long time, and it is widely reconised that just the process of checking an abstract for basic structure (e.g. IMRAD) and word count is a massive undertaking for conference organisers at large events. If we apply published reading rates (effective), then it would take either seriously long times or lots of people to check every abstract that is submitted to a large conference. Thus, it is often rare for an abstract to be rejected at a large-scale conference (>300 delegates) & the idea of peer-review of the abstract  is open to question. This is an information management problem, and may be something to which concepts such as post-publication review and altmetrics are suited.

Importantly though - if an abstract is a summary of a larger work .... then where is the work?  We have almost infinite (& relatively cost-effective) capacity to host full materials on the web (along with mechanisms of review), so why aren't things like extended abstracts, full poster images, short papers, pod casts, video media, etc. available? A proper depth of information enables quality judgements & utility, so I hope that we start to question the benefit of submissions & publications that will only be published in abstract form. The fact that an abstract appears in a peer-reviewed journal means little  :-/

What if I have a paper accepted for a conference and the journal publishes the data from my poster in its journal. later when i try to submit the full text article to another journal the editors return it back to me commenting there is plaigrism and self reporting since the same data is already being published . What to do now ?

Ahmad: if you present a poster, how is this a paper? The conference may publish your abstract, but this is not the same as dual publication of a full paper or substantial text. Even if the abstract is 'similar', the main work will be more detailed.

Admittedly, a published short abstract (even in an index journal) is not equivalent to a full paper, but as it is published in journal with DOI, it could be considered as a journal publication. However, it could be specified in CV with separate titles under journal publications (e.g., conference abstract publication). 

No, not on par with original research articles and reviews.

Regards, Christian

It is fully incromprehensible, that Reserach Gate has allowed this discussion for four years, without finding a scientifically correct solution. I sent the bottem Email to ResearchGate support and info over a month ago and recieved no answer. This is a real scandal!

Herbert Jennissen

Von: Prof. Dr. H. Jennissen [mailto:[email protected]]

Gesendet: Freitag, 23. März 2018 14:49

An: '[email protected]'

Cc: '[email protected]'

Betreff: Problems with "Confirm Authorship"

Ladies and Gentlemen!

The problem is an old one and I wrote to you about this many years ago without avail. At present all articles of a person are filled into "one pot", whether (i) peer reviewed full paper in journal, (ii) published peer reviewed as Book or in a Book (iii) published without peer review as an abstract or in a book. Granted patents, which have been rigorously reviewed, proving that the technological endeavor is new and original/creative, are not allowed in Research Gate. "Novelty and originality are often not the case even for peer reviewed papers.

Of prime importance in viewing an author are of course the peer reviewed papers. Now what happens? For example a person has 100 peer reviewed papers. Then very soon he is also constantly "bombarded" with: (a) "Is this your publication?"; (b) authors 'Jack Smith' and 2 others ask: "Is this your publication?" or (c) "Confirm authorship".

Being asked these questions is OK but the consequences are not. Your only choice, if it is your paper is: "Confirm authorship of your publication to add it to your profile" What if it the paper is already in your profile with a misspelled word? Then you now have it twice falsely inflating your profile. What if this is a citable abstract in a journal, not a paper? Then the abstract is now added like a full paper, again falsely inflating your profile.

Solution: There should be three alternatives to "Is this your publication?":

• Confirm authorship without adding to profile (in case it is already in profile)

• Confirm authorship with adding to your profile (in case it is new)

• Confirm authorship with replacement of publication in your profile (in case article in profile is erroneous or pdf-copy bad)

Because there is only one answer, I do not answer the above questions at all, with the consequence that there is constantly a back log of 30-40 unanswered questions in my file. Already now it would be of great help if there were the above three possible answers to these questions: I would also like to suggest that "Research Gate" allows three fundamental categories for published articles e.g.:

(1) peer reviewed full papers in Journals or books

(2) citable abstracts in journals and

(3) miscellaneous Books or articles in books.

Each author can then list his publications in these three categories giving a realistic picture of his work. Concerning patents, they could be restricted to granted patent families, e.g. the International PCT Publication, or the fist granted patent of the family, but not other following national patents of the same family.Patents nowadays play in important role in research grants - at least in Germany - where you are asked by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to list granted patents connected with your research grant application.

It would be nice hearing from you, thank you!

With best regards, Herbert Jennissen

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Herbert P. Jennissen

Institut für Physiologische Chemie und

Klinik für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgie

- Biochemische Endokrinologie -

Universität Duisburg-Essen

Universitätsklinikum Essen Hufelandstr. 55

D-45122 Essen Germany

Tel.: +49-201-723-4125 / (-84177)

Fax: +49-201-723-5944 "

Correction: to above letter: "I sent the bottem Email to ResearchGate support and info over half a month ago and recieved no answer.

Tell the editor and no problem

Yes dear Dr. Jesus Cortes-Rodicio , published abstract is considered as a publication in my institution though the value/point given to the abstract is much lower than the journal article.

Yes it considered as a publication even if it published again in a whole article at a journal.

Good question

Interesting question.

The problems with "Confirm Authorship" are still unresolved. Research gate RG) is still refusing to answer my letter from March 23, 2018 (see above).The people at RG apparently do not "identify themselves as experts in their field by providing high-quality answers to our qualified questions and problems", although they require this from others.

Whether indexed or non-indexed, an abstract from a conference cannot be equated with a written paper on the subject in a reputed journal. The terms, ‘abstracts’ or ‘extended abstracts’, indicates that these are not validly published, and therefore, once the conference is over, the authors must publish the full paper immediately in a regular primary journal.

In fact, both oral and poster presentations in conferences are meant to report ongoing works. This gives the researchers an opportunity to disseminate new findings and to get valuable feedback from the audience. The presentation and its feedback are useful for the preparation of the paper for later publication because the audience’s questions may probe weaknesses in the work. The authors can prepare a nice paper taking into account such suggestions and publish it in a journal of their choice!

I am struggling with the same question. I see a lot of researchers using abstracts

published on indexed journals as publications, others don't. Is there a document that we could use as a reference that could support this choice?

it can not count as a publications, just can list on your CV of academic career.

I was thinking of adding a few conference abstracts but then found RG does not have conference abstracts though conference presentations are clearly identified and so are conference papers. I agree with most of the comments that abstracts are not publications in real sense but then conference presentations are not publication either. I think this will remain a debatable issue until RG clearly identifies them.

Still did not get final answer ?

I personally think that you can list your conference presentations under "Conferences" (or something under that heading). If your abstract is published later as a supplement in a journal, then you should cite the journal, indicate that it is an abstract, and give the exact page number (i.e. 54(2):S193(abstr.). Or some variation, thereof. You can also hyperlink to the online pdf if you so choose--for online CV purposes.

Hello Kauahi Perez, Certainly it has to be considered as a publication. There is no doubt. Regards

Hello Sir,

Should the conference abstracts published on indexed journals be taken into account as a publication is ok. Same time mentioned the paper are paper presented. any one selected ok (or ) both considerable?

No I don't think so .I think some may need further revision before publishing not to be accepted once it is presented in a conference

Only when there are no available publications on a subject.