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Abstract Leading citation databases have made concerted efforts to reflect academic conference contributions in the form of proceedings papers in their databases. We studied global trends and a regional case study to determine the relative representation of conference proceedings in the global scholarly literature using the Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions. We designed our case study of ten Southeast Asian countries to uncover conspicuous publishing patterns obscured by global average figures. As a result, we discovered that Indonesia alone has made a recent and remarkable shift towards conference proceedings publishing. This trend was not the result of expanding database coverage but may be linked to a rapid increase in conferences locally hosted in Indonesia. The conclusion suggests that conference proceedings are increasingly indexed by major databases, and that scholars might have found advantage in publishing conference papers that were quicker and easier to publish than journal articles or book chapters. Our study is relevant to policy makers in the area of research evaluation because it highlights potential changes in academic publishing behaviour by those being assessed.
Philip J. Purnell (Fri,) studied this question.