Notes
The other sections are practical. These are positions. For a separate operational reference outside conference evaluation, see learn more .
On invitations. Read them as assertions rather than as description, and sort by whether an external source could confirm them. A legitimate conference makes mostly checkable claims because it has things to point at; a fabricated one fills the space with adjectives from necessity. For a second perspective, consult UNESCO .
On automation. Old advice described effort signals — bad English, thin sites, vague committees — and effort stopped being scarce. What survived is time, external verification, money direction and accountability. Guidance written before 2024 about professional presentation is now actively misleading.
On prestige. A conference can be entirely legitimate, widely respected, and a poor use of your money. Reputation measures the average while you attend a specific programme, lags reality by years, and correlates with cost.
On the programme, which is the product while the venue, the city and the reputation are packaging — and which people read after booking.
On who verification excludes. Every check assumes a network, an institution or a subscription, and the people it fails are approximately the target market for predatory events. Being deceived is not a competence failure.
On conferences without proceedings, which is a legitimate model with real advantages — and which shifts the record from institutional to personal, so a field's knowledge comes to depend on individual habits.
And on why the market exists: predatory conferences are a supply response to assessment that counts output, which means individual vigilance is the last and weakest place to intervene, and treating deception as a personal failure is what stops people writing the warnings others would use.
Against the Listicle
The best conferences to attend this year is a format that cannot answer the question, and its incentives point the wrong way.
Automation Changed the Fakes
Fabricating credibility used to be expensive. Now it is not, and every signal that relied on effort has quietly stopped working.
As a Cost Centre
Conference budgets get cut because nobody can show what they returned. The reporting habit that protects them is the one nobody has.
The Event Ends
A conference is four days and a claim about permanence. Where the two diverge, and the short version of everything on this site.
An Invitation Is Claims
Every line in a conference invitation asserts something. Sorting them into checkable and not is the whole method.
Without Proceedings
No publication is a legitimate model with real advantages, and it puts the entire record on the people who were there.
Prestige Is Not a Signal
A conference can be entirely legitimate, widely respected, and a poor use of your money. Those are three separate judgements.
The Programme Is the Product
Everything else a conference sells is packaging. Reading the programme takes fifteen minutes and almost nobody does it before paying.
Publish or Perish
Predatory conferences are a supply response to a demand created by how careers are assessed. That is where the fix has to be.
Who Verification Excludes
Every check on this site assumes a network, a language and an institution. Not everybody has them, and the advice fails them first.
What the Archive Shows
This site runs on a 2015 conference archive. Four things it demonstrates about the record that no argument makes as well.