Five things that can help you get your conference submission accepted

Over the past few months, I've been putting together the program for the upcoming Canadian Economics Association meetings: http://economics.ca/2017/en/.  It's a reasonable sized conference - this year we had almost 900 submissions - and quite a few papers were rejected.

Yet often papers were not accepted for conference program simply because the author made an easily avoidable mistake when submitting the paper. Here is a list of simple things that anyone can do to increase the chances of their conference submission being accepted.

1. Submit on time, and include all necessary information
2. Invest some time in writing a compelling, informative abstract. It should clearly state the research question, the methods used to answer the question, the results (if any) obtained, and explain why the answer to the research question matters.
3. Choose the right Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes or keywords to describe your paper. In larger conferences, the papers are typically divided by field or sub-field, and parcelled out to sub-committees. It is vitally important to make sure that your paper goes to the right sub-committee. For example, imagine a paper that takes a standard econometric technique and uses it to identify the causal effects of, say, parental leave on divorce rates. If the paper goes to the econometrics subcommittee, they will likely say "nothing new here." If it goes to a labour or economics of the family subcommitte, they may well say "yes, let's put it on the program."
4. Curate your on-line image. When I am hesitating between accepting and rejecting a paper, I typically google the author and see what comes up. Hence it is vitally important to create a google scholar profile, especially if you have a fairly common name. It is also a good idea to have a personal website, with an up-to-date c.v. on it.
5. Organize a session, and make your paper a part of it. Pre-organized sessions are attractive to conference organizers, because they involve very little work. As long as there is at least one good paper in the session, it is tempting to accept the entire thing.

This may all seem fairly obvious. But a remarkable number of papers fail to get accepted because the submitter did not do one of these five things.

 

Comments

[cm]

This is excellent advice. And no, it is not obvious unless you are already initiated to this.

Please don't take this the wrong way, this is basically "Marketing 101" (or even a prerequisite to it), which I personally learned much too late in my own life. It *may* have helped to include something related to "audience awareness" (for lack of a better term). Rephrasing with that context:

(1) Be there when it counts, and make it easy for your audience.

(2), (3) Make it easy for your audience. Also think about who your audience is (or who you would like it to be?) to begin with.

(4) Make yourself attractive to your audience. May also go under "make it easy for your audience".

(5) Engage with your audience??? - maybe

Also: "audience" has to be replaced with "gatekeepers/deciders between you and your audience" as applicable.

Depending on the context, you may not want to make nice with the gatekeepers, and then none of this will work. But in the academic conference/journal context that's almost always not the case.