In academia and librarianship, conference proceedings are a collection of published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. Conference proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the conference. They are the written record of the work that is presented to fellow researchers. In many fields, they are published as supplements to ; in some, they are considered the main dissemination route; in others they may be considered grey literature. They are usually distributed in printed or electronic volumes, either before the conference opens or after it has closed.
A less common, broader meaning of proceedings are the acts and happenings of an academic field, a learned society. For example, the title of the Acta Crystallographica journals is Neo-Latin for "Proceedings in Crystallography"; the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is the main journal of that academy. Scientific journals whose ISO 4 title abbreviations start with Proc, Acta, or Trans are journals of the proceedings (transactions) of a field or of an organization concerned with it, in that secondary meaning of the word.
Since the collection of papers comes from individual researchers, the character of proceedings is distinctly different from an educational textbook. Each paper typically is quite isolated from the other papers in the proceedings. Mostly there is no general argument leading from one contribution to the next.
In some cases, the editing of the proceedings may decide to further develop the proceedings into a textbook. This may even be a goal at the outset of the conference.
In the sciences, the quality of publications in conference proceedings is usually not as high as that of international scientific journals. However, in computer science, papers published in conference proceedings are accorded a higher status than in other fields, due to the fast-moving nature of the field.
A number of full-fledged unconnected to particular conferences also use the word "proceedings" as part of their name, for example, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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