Conferences provide excellent opportunities for meeting, building relationships and sharing your research with other researchers working in your field.

Research is usually presented at conferences as an oral presentation or a poster, and abstracts are usually required when submitting to present at a conference. Conference proceedings are often published after the event is finished and usually comprise abstracts and full papers from the conference. Written papers are often optional for conference presenters and may be restricted to participants who gave oral presentations. While full conference papers will count as traditional research outputs if they have undergone peer review, in most disciplines it is better to publish your research outcomes as a conventional journal article.

Choosing quality conferences

You need to ensure that you select the right conferences to attend and to present your research at. Use the ! THINK ✓ CHECK > ATTEND tool to verify that it is a quality conference. Predatory conferences or predatory meetings, like predatory journals are exploitative and will provide little or no peer review. Characteristics include:

• Rapid acceptance of submissions with poor quality control and little or no true peer review 
• Acceptance of submissions consisting of nonsense and/or hoaxed content
• Notification of high attendance fees and charges only after acceptance 
• Claiming involvement of academics in conference organising committees without their agreement, and not allowing them to resign
• Mimicry of the names or website styles of more established conferences