Both the ACM and IEEE have their name attached to a host of conferences and journals. Some are known to be better than others, but I feel generally that any conference or journal with the ACM or IEEE brands attached are considered decent quality. (Questions like this indicate I'm not the only one to think so.)

Question: Are publications in IEEE and ACM journals and conference proceedings automatically considered decent quality by prospective employers in academia? (When applying for postdocs, assistant professor positions, and so on.) Or is it more nuanced than that?

Essentially, I'm asking what weight do these brands have.

The ARC ERA2010 rank these journals and conferences from A* (the best possible ranking) to C (the lowest possible ranking). But it's possible that these rankings are not an accurate gauge of the community's attitude towards a particular journal or conference.

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    What kind of employers are you considering? The majority of IT companies will not care about your publications. If anything, the publications show that you can do a bit of work, but they don't show that you can do "real work"(tm). The "good venues for publications" game is so academic that only very few HR representives or interviewer will ever some up with the idea to check whether a publication is in a good venue or not. Of course, this comment is a bit subjective (I don't know all of the employers), and does not apply to applications to research labs. – DCTLib Jul 27 '15 at 7:43
  • I mean in academic positions (where publications matter [I presume!]); I edited my question to reflect this. – Rebecca J. Stones Jul 27 '15 at 8:34
  • what weight do these brands have — The correct answer ought to be NONE. ACM and IEEE sponsor several top-tier conferences, but not every sponsored conference is top-tier, and not every top-tier conference is sponsored. If you want to find out how good a conference is, there is no alternative but to read the papers. But I have admit to some personal bias on this point. – JeffE Aug 24 '15 at 14:43

Within many sub-disciplines of Computer Science, conference proceedings, rather than journals, are the main publishing venues for new research. In contrast to journals, which have an impact factor, there is no unified metric to quantify the quality of a conference proceeding. Although there are indeed a number of categorizations, I haven't seen them actively being used to decide which venue to submit to. I found that within these sub-disciplines of Computer Science, academics are very aware of which conferences and journals are competitive and what the impact is of publishing a paper there. These are indeed mostly ACM/IEEE, thus, giving them a certain status by name. Nevertheless, just because the conference is supported by ACM or IEEE, does not imply that it is a high quality conference.

However, when you apply for post-doc or faculty position, there might be people on the hiring committee that are not fully aware of this. To mitigate this issue and emphasize this difference to other fields, I have seen several resumes that explicitly explain how the publishing model in their respective subfield differs from the "classic" journal based system. You can achieve this with a simple note in your resume before listing your publications. An example:

Note: Within the field of (subdiscipline of computer science), selective peer-reviewed conference proceedings are the main dissemination of novel research contributions. Conferences such as (conf x) and (conf y) are highly competitive publication venues with 2 review rounds that include reviews from 3 external reviewers as well as at least 2 associate chairs. These conferences have an acceptance rate between 10 and 15 % and papers that are accepted and published are refereed as full length papers.


Ok a couple of things for me;

Firstly just because it's published doesn't mean it holds academic calibre. To quote an old lecturer of mine - "Some of the most popular papers are popular because they're wrong".

If anything its a point of conversation if in your CV you've declared your papers and also offers them a location to go and find, read then evaluate your work. I think that's a big thing too, you're dealing with seasoned 'paper-readers' they most certainly won't think - "Hey this guys published, they must be awesome". They'll want to read your papers and develop their own opinion.

I'd say it depends partially on the type of personality of your employer (if going for non academic roles). My current employer likes that I went to a good university and often tells some of our clients. So I assume if I had published papers he would also love to tell people that. To my last employer I could easily see that as a nice bonus (during the interview) but nothing more passed that, he preferred to know that I've had real world experience but after the interview we never discussed it again.

In terms of the 'brands' of ACM and IEEE they were always the locations I was sent to for getting research papers from both my undergrad and postgrad university so if there had been 'better' brands - we would have been directed there

I hope this offers a bit of help for you

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