Presenting at a conference that both peer reviews and publishes allows you to receive feedback as part of the peer review process and from other conference delegates, provides collaboration and networking opportunities and provides you with an academic publication.

Check for the following when choosing a conference:

• are you able to arrange financing to attend it?
• is only the abstract peer reviewed or is the entire paper peer reviewed?
• will the full paper be published? does this meet HERDC requirements?
• do you have proof that the conference is of national or international importance? (required for HERDC acceptance)
• will the conference be indexed in Scopus or Web of Science? Note: conferences indexed by Web of Science are not necessarily peer reviewed, and Scopus indexes conferences as a special issue of a journal or as a dedicated conference proceeding.

 Discipline based conferences

Think. Check. Attend. Choosing the right conference to attend and present your research
Think. Check. Attend. is an international initiative that aims to guide and assist researchers and scholars when choosing trusted conferences to attend and present their research at. The initiative has been introduced by Knowledge E, and we welcome any support or collaboration from fellow organizations across the scholarly community who share our aim of improving ethical communication of academic research results and building a more knowledgeable world.

See also Think. Check. Attend. Your guide to avoiding predatory conferences

The grey area with conferences

There is a grey area within the organisation of conferences - it is where for-profit companies make money from hosting conferences. These types of conferences generally have little to do with institutional bodies associated with different research fields. This means that leading researchers will not usually attend and a researcher's paper will not have the kind of audience reach they were hoping for. The attraction for researchers is that they are able to maintain they are research active (and receive sponsorship from their university for travel expenses). Papers where someone is willing to pay to present will rarely be rejected.

Standard academic conferences are usually undertaken by not-for-profit organisations, scholarly and scientific organisations, and academic institutions. Such conferences rarely make a profit and often just cover costs. Profit-making conferences will have priorities other than bringing value to a research field.

When associations sponsor conferences they bring volunteers from the field to provide peer review and a longer term engagement that facilitates a regular conference cycle. This support is crucial to a reputable research conference. Profit-making conferences will often not have a regular cycle and continuity and can often result in an unengaging conference experience. Participants in the conference will often not appear in other venues and the reviewing is done by the same group of inexperienced people.

Such organisations also often facilitate the conversion of papers from their conferences to articles published in their journals, often without the necessary process of improvement and peer review. This conversion of conference papers is attractive to many researchers who are sometimes then invited to some form of editorial association with the journal.