Are Articles Published in Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings Inferior to Journals?

The answer to the question posed by the title of this article is: It depends on the field and the specific conference and journals that we are referring to. In certain science fields, journals have more prestige than conferences. Articles published in conferences are typically not considered as "publications" when evaluating the annual performance of an academician.

In computer science, it can be argued that an article published in a peer-reviewed premier conference proceedings has the same value as an article published in a prestigious journal. You can read Michael Ernst's (a Computer Science Professor at Washington University) opinion about this issue here (written in 2006). In 2009, when Mosche Vardi (a Computer Science Professor at Rice University) was the Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM, he wrote a letter to open up discussions wether conferences are indeed superior in computer science. In January 2020, he wrote another article related to this issue. Of course, there are arguments on both sides (whether you prefer conferences over journals and vice versa) and you can find them on the Internet.

I think that when evaluating a researcher in computer science, whether it is for annual performance evaluation or promotion, articles published in both conferences and journals should be taken into account. In other words, merit should be given if the researcher is able to publish either in top conferences or journals. In security and cryptography at least, conferences are on par with journals. New results can be found published at conferences and later, an extended version can be submitted to journals.

In cryptography, one example where conference is the initial venue to submit new results is the seminal work by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir on differential cryptanalysis. The work was first published at the CRYPTO conference in 1990 and an extended version appeared in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Cryptology. Another example is the work of Dan Boneh and Matt Franklin on identity-based encryption. The work was first published at CRYPTO 2001 and an extended version appeared in a 2003 issue of the SIAM Journal of Computing.

Of course, not every conference and journal are of the same quality. A list of regular security and cryptography conferences and journals is provided here. I highly encourage students and researchers especially in Malaysia, to submit articles to these venues. Here, I shall present examples where distinguished researchers and professors publish in both journals and conferences, and in certain years, publish only in conferences.

One example is Silvio Micali, Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) . According to DBLP, the 2012 ACM's A.M. Turing Award (hereafter will be denoted as Turing Award) recipient had only three conference publications in 2012. He did not have any articles published in journals for that particular year. In fact, this was not the only year where there were no record of his publication in journals. Others include (but not limited to) the years 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2003-2009.

For the uninitiated, according to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),
"The A.M. Turing Award, sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of Computing, was named in honor of Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954), a British mathematician and computer scientist. He made fundamental advances in computer architecture, algorithms, formalization of computing, and artificial intelligence. Turing was also instrumental in British code-breaking work during World War II."

Other distinguished researchers that do not annually publish in journals, or devote to publish only in journals include (the years enclosed in parentheses denote instances when no publication in journals is recorded by DBLP for the stated researcher):

• Shafi Goldwasser, Professor at MIT CSAIL and Weizmann Institute of Science (2008, 2009). She is also a recipient of the 2012 Turing Award.
• Whitfield Diffie, Consulting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University (1988, 1989). He is one of the recipient of the 2015 Turing Award and the co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
• Adi Shamir, Professor at Weizmann Institute of Science (2009, 2013). He is one of the recipient of the 2002 Turing Award and the co-inventor of the RSA cryptosystem.

This does not mean that we should abandon publishing in journals altogether. It is just that we should not over-rely on journals as the sole premier publishing avenue and neglecting conferences as being of lower standard.