How do people respond to conference deadlines?
Together with Eduardo Izquierdo-Torres, I'm organisng a workshop (Evolution and Dynamics of Learning - note that we're still finalising the CFP and website) at this year's European Conference on Artificial Life. We're working out when to set the various deadlines (paper submission, return of reviews to us, camera-ready proofs), and it led me to wonder about something: do most researchers set out to write papers in response to a specific conference/workshop announcement, or do they write papers when they're ready and then look for a conference or workshop to submit them to? I know that a large proportion of my small readership are active scientists at one level or another; what do you do?
Comments
If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done.
Hehe...
While undoubtedly true, that doesn't really answer the question, though I realise on re-reading my post that I should explain why to make the whole post a little clearer. I know that I have in the past chosen which conference to submit to based on which one had a deadline that I thought I could actually make. That still involved some last-minute work to get the final edit of the paper together, but what I was really wondering is if other people sometimes either start a project or pick the moment at which to write a 'snapshot' paper about a project based on the desire to get work into a specific conference.
Personally, I tend to snapshot ongoing research. On the other hand, there's also a big aspect of "am I ready for a talk right now", so it's a mix of both. That said, I'm giving talks, not submitting papers, so snapshotting is much less expensive for me, and requires much less planning ahead -- a day to figure out a draft outline for submission, and then writing the talk itself, which can and has (although I hate doing it this way) happened largely at the conference itself.
Dymaxion: at the sort of conferences you present at, is it generally expected that people will present works-in-progress without necessarily having any results to report?
I feel like in my field this is not looked on very kindly, and I think that's a real shame - a lot of what I get out of the off-line part of a conference is an idea of what potential collaborators are working on, but because this doesn't get into to the programme I only tend to find this out about the people I also socialise with.