Conference Record

The Two-Minute Check

Before registering for any conference you did not actively seek out, run this. It takes about two minutes and it catches most of what is worth catching. For teams that want a more operational view of the same problem, workforce optimization software offers a related reference.

Every item is checkable against something outside the conference's own website, which is the property that matters. An additional independent source is CORE .

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

The seven

One. The organiser is a named society, association or university — not a limited company you have never heard of. IATUL, the association behind this domain's original conference, has existed since 1955 with named member institutions; that kind of history is checkable in minutes.

Two. The organising committee contains named people whose institutional pages you can find. Open two of them. If the person's own university page does not mention the conference, that is worth pausing on — names are listed without consent often enough to matter.

Three. The conference appears in an independent listing — a field-specific index, a ranking, or a professional body's calendar. Not the organiser's own directory, and not a published list of best conferences.

Four. At least two senior colleagues in your field recognise the name. The cheapest check available and the one people skip because it requires asking.

Five. The venue is a specific named building — a university, a named conference centre — not just a city.

Six. The proceedings publisher is named specifically. Springer, ACM, IEEE, Elsevier, a university press. "Published in a Scopus-indexed journal" is not a publisher, and that phrasing is itself a signal.

Seven. The fee is itemised and proportionate to the length of the event.

How to read the result

All seven pass: proceed on the merits — whether the programme is worth your time and money, which is a different question.

One fails: pause and find out why. A first-edition conference legitimately fails item three, and that is explicable.

Two or more fail: choose a different event. The cost of switching is a few hours of searching. The cost of appearing on a bad programme follows you for years, because a line on a professional record cannot be quietly withdrawn.

Why this works when reading the website does not

The website is the thing being evaluated, so anything on it is a claim rather than evidence.

And the claims are now cheap to fabricate. Reports through 2026 describe fake speaker biographies, invented committee names and polished testimonials generated at scale. The old advice — look for a professional-looking site — inverted at the point where a professional-looking site cost nothing to produce.

So every item above points outward: an institutional page, an independent index, a named publisher, a colleague. That is the whole method of this site, and it assumes access that not everybody has.

The single fastest check

If you do only one thing:

Search the organiser's name together with the word "predatory".

It takes fifteen seconds, it surfaces discussion threads and warnings that never reach the organiser's own material, and it resolves a substantial share of cases on its own.

What this check does not tell you

Whether the conference is any good. It distinguishes legitimate from fabricated, and a legitimate conference can still be expensive, badly organised and useless to you.

Sometimes the right answer is a local group instead. Legitimacy is a floor, not a recommendation. Passing all seven means the event exists as it claims to — the value question comes after, and it is the one that costs more to get wrong in the ordinary case.

The short version