Publication Targets
Introduction
To focus our publication activitiy and to provide guidance
to students and early career researchers, showing them what to
aim for in order to gain international recognition, we keep a
list of “top-tier target venues” that we aim to
publish in.
In TS we believe that such a list, if not outright
peer-reviewed, at least needs to be open to scrutiny.
We therefore believe that it is
best to publish the list, as well as the process we used to
construct it.
Process
In order to obtain a robust result that stands up to scrutiny, we
decided on the following approach for constructing the list.
- Define a set of sub-disciplines which cover our research
areas. Note that these are not meant to cover anything that might
go as “software systems”, but should reflect the
current and likely near-future research activities in TS, as well
as the character of these activities (eg theoretical vs
practical). As such, the set is likely to evolve over the years.
- For each sub-discipline, select a number (typically
6–10) of eminent people in the field. We have no formal
definition of what makes someone “eminent”, but aim
to pick researchers who everybody in the field would agree that
they are among the highly regarded and established leaders. This
means that the list makes no claim to being complete, only that
everybody on the list clearly deserves to be in there. People on
the list are normally ACM or IEEE fellows (frequently both), have
(Google Scholar) h-indices above 50 and total citation counts
exceeding 10,000 (although neither of these are absolute
criteria), and frequently other indicators of esteem. One
essential criterion is that they have a string of highly-cited
publications in the area in during the last ten years, been
active in in the field during the last five years. Also, in order
to be suitable for this process, an eminent person's research
must be comparable in character to ours (eg in distributed
systems we are looking for systems people rather than
theorists).
- For each of those heroes, list the venues where the bulk of
their publications were in the last ten years (counting how many
papers they published in each).
- Across each sub-discipline, the venues where the bulk of the
combined publications of our heroes went establishes our target
list, but we include only venues where several of our heroes have
published frequently and recently.
This process produced surprisingly clear results, with hardly any
borderline cases. In the case of borderline venues, the group
leaders used their judgement (which generally was conservative,
in the sense of excluding borderline venues). Judgement is also
required in the case of relatively new venues (less than five
years old). Such venues, if included in the list, will require
re-confirmation through the standard process within a few years.
Disciplines and Venues
|
Short
|
Discipline
|
Conferences
|
Journals
|
Journal
fraction
|
Comment
|
|
OS
|
Operating Systems
|
ASPLOS, EuroSys, FAST, HotOS, OSDI, SOSP, Usenix ATC
|
TOCS
|
<10%
|
ignore theory
|
|
RT
|
Real-time / Cyber-physical Systems
|
ECRTS, RTAS, RTSS
|
RTS
|
10–20%
|
ignore theory
|
|
DS
|
|
Dep
|
Dependability and Safety
|
DSN, SRDS
|
TDSC
|
20–30%
|
ignore theory
|
|
Sec
|
Security and Privacy
|
CCS, NDSS, IEEE S&P, Usenix Security
|
|
10–20%
|
|
|
PL
|
Programming Languages and Systems
|
ECOOP, ESOP, ICFP, ISMM, OOPSLA, PLDI, POPL, PPOPP
|
JFP, TOPLAS
|
10%
|
|
|
Thy
|
Theory and Concurrency
|
CONCUR, FOSSACS, ICALP, LICS, RAMiCS
|
I&C, JACM, LMCS, TCS
|
50%
|
|
|
MC
|
Model Checking and Verification Tools
|
ATVA, CAV, FM, FORMATS, HSCC, QEST, SAS, TACAS, VMCAI
|
FMSD, JCSS, STTT
|
35%
|
|
|
TP
|
Theorem Proving
|
CADE, FMCAD, ITP, IJCAR, LPAR
|
FAC, JAR, TCS, TOCL
|
25%
|
|
|
N/A
|
General
|
SIGMETRICS
|
Computing Surveys,
CACM “Research Highlights”,
any ACM or IEEE Transactions
|
|
|
Notes:
- Some venues are relevant to multiple sub-disciplines, we only
list them once in the most appropriate category.
- Only the complete list is relevant, the sub-disciplines are
only a mechanism for deriving the list.
- The general category is to capture prestigious
venues which are not discipline-specific or to recognise top
venues for occasional out-of-area work.
- The journal fraction refers to the fraction of
publicatons of our discipline heroes that was in journals.
- This list was derived for TS purposes. It does not
pretend to be complete for other groups operating in software
systems (which might have a different mix of theory vs systems
work). However, we believe that the process for deriving it is
widely applicable.
History
The present list was built in the first half of 2013, with minor
adjustments since, to reflect the tighter research focus of the smaller
TS group at UNSW. It is due for another revision.
