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Abstract
Academic conferences are platforms established by scientists to provide broad access to their research. For this reason, it is important to have influential researchers presenting plenary talks and for the scientific community in that field to submit their work. Various organizations and academic institutions organize hundreds of academic conferences a year. Academics have to select conferences to attend, since it is not possible to participate in every conference. Conference selection takes into account such factors as: the registration fee, subject of the conference and its appropriateness, conference language and the deadline for submission. We consider the specific criteria that academics use to choose conferences and effective decision-making in this field. In this study, we use an approach based on analytic network processes (ANPs) to appropriately choose a conference based on multiple criteria.
Keywords: Analytic Network Process (ANP), multicriteria decision making, selection of an academic conference.
1 Introduction
Academic conferences are events that present the work of academics and students (in the form of papers and posters). Their contribution is very important to academic study, due to the review process at the acceptance stage and feed- back when work is presented. Also, such conferences are important opportunities to work on specific issues and enable researchers in the same field to meet each other.
Academic conferences are organized for various purposes. Such meetings may be on specific topics, designed to be instructive and/or a forum for academics and students to interact in their research and learn new things.
Conferences are categorized as national or international. At such meetings, papers are presented, short or long-term training seminars and public meetings are held, as well as working groups being organized. The process of accepting papers for a conference and how academics select conferences have been studied in the literature. Yüncü and Kozak (2010) developed a scale based on the criteria which Turkish academics use to select a conference. They surveyed 1100 academics in Turkey from a large number of universities and the data from this survey were analyzed with the help of software packages. Factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed to determine the attractiveness of a congress or conference. The location of a congress was a very significant factor according to this study, the...