Choose a computer science conference by matching your paper to the current call’s scope, review criteria, track, and publication outcome—not by chasing a ranking alone. Then check submission policies and practical requirements before committing. The right venue is the one that can evaluate the work fairly, reach its intended audience, and accept the paper under conditions your team can meet.
Start with the paper and the current call
Make a shortlist of plausible venues in the paper’s subfield, then read each venue’s current call for papers. Match the paper’s research question, methods, evidence, and contribution to the topics and review criteria the call actually names. A familiar conference name or broad subject label is not enough: a paper can be relevant to a field but still miss what a particular track asks reviewers to assess.
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For example, the RecSys 2026 call says reviewers assess relevance, originality, rigor, impact, and replicability. It also warns that papers that are out of scope, incomplete, or lack sufficient evidence for their main claims may be rejected without full review. That is a reason to check fit and evidence before polishing a submission for a venue, not after it has been sent.
Compare the specific tracks, not just the conference
One conference can offer submission categories with different review processes and publication records. Before choosing a track, establish what kind of submission it accepts, how it is reviewed, what feedback it receives, and where accepted work appears. Do not assume that a talk, poster, workshop paper, or short paper is reviewed or archived in the same way as a full paper.
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The HCOMP/Collective Intelligence 2026 call illustrates the difference. Its full papers receive three detailed external reviews coordinated by a program committee member; accepted full papers appear in archival ACM Digital Library proceedings and receive individual DOIs. Talks receive brief reviews by two program committee members and are posted on the conference website without archival proceedings or individual DOIs. The call sets full-paper submissions at up to 6,000 words excluding references, and talk submissions at up to 1,500 words. Those lengths and review arrangements apply to HCOMP/CI 2026, not to conferences generally.
Build a comparison sheet for candidate venues
For each plausible conference and track, record a factual answer and link to the relevant current call or policy. Separate conditions that must be met from preferences that help distinguish otherwise suitable options.
| Comparison axis | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Scope and methods | Does the call include the paper’s research question and methods, and is the intended committee and audience likely to value them? |
| Contribution and evidence | Do the stated review criteria fit the kind of contribution, and does the manuscript support its claims with the evidence expected? |
| Track and review | Which category fits the work? Who reviews it, how detailed is the review, and what feedback is offered? |
| Publication outcome | Is accepted work archival? What proceedings or repository will contain it? Does it receive a DOI? Is publication promised in proceedings, or only a website program or abstract collection? |
| Policies and eligibility | Are prior work, simultaneous submissions, anonymity, authorship, ethics, and presentation rules compatible with the paper and team? |
| Audience and professional value | Will researchers in the relevant community encounter and use the work? Rankings and examples of publication patterns can inform this, but cannot answer it by themselves. |
| Practical constraints | Can the team meet the deadline and format requirements, attend or present if required, and handle registration, travel, and any publication charge? |
Keep “must meet” items—scope, originality, eligibility, deadline, and policy compliance—separate from preferences such as broader audience, review depth, visibility, location, or cost. Do not send an out-of-scope paper to a venue simply because its rank or reputation looks attractive.
Use rankings as context, not a verdict
The International CORE (ICORE) database can help discover and compare selected international computer science and computer systems engineering conferences. ICORE says its ranking method combines automated data metrics, conference submissions, and expert committee judgment; its database supports lookup by name, acronym, or research area, and shows current and historical ranks. Its tools also support inspection of researchers’ publication patterns and a field-specific citation-based centile. See the ICORE conference rankings portal and its 2026 ranking update.
Interpret the rank label in its own terms. ICORE describes A* as a flagship designation—“A* = A + flagship”—and says it is not necessarily stronger in citation performance. It describes A as excellent and B as good to very good. An unranked venue has no ranking decision in the database; that status alone does not show that the venue is poor or illegitimate. Check the venue’s own page, current call, organizers, proceedings, and peer-review process.
In ICORE’s 2026 database, 825 venues were ranked: A* accounted for 7.52%, A for 13.09%, B for 30.18%, Australasian B for 0.73%, C for 46.18%, and Australasian C for 2.3%. The portal separately lists 162 venues as “Other.” These are proportions and counts within that database, not a global census, a probability of acceptance, or a judgment about a particular conference.
Rankings reflect particular methods and update cycles, while fit depends on the individual paper. Acceptance-rate figures are useful only when they are attributable to a specific conference, year, and track and the organizers provide the numerator and denominator or another clear basis. Do not treat a ranking or an unattributed acceptance-rate figure as a substitute for reading the call.
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Read the target venue’s current policies before submitting, especially if the manuscript overlaps with a workshop paper, conference paper, preprint, or another submission under review. Rules differ, and a seemingly small amount of overlap can still require citation, explanation, or disclosure.
Best Value
For example, the ACM SIGPLAN republication policy says that closely related prior conference or workshop work must be cited, the relationship to the new manuscript explained, and the program chair explicitly informed. It says program committees judge the additional publication value and states: “We foresee no circumstances under which an unrevised conference paper will be accepted to a second conference.” If the boundary is unclear, the policy advises authors to ask program chairs in advance.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Verify what publication and indexing mean
Check the specific track’s stated publication destination and timing. A reviewed presentation is not necessarily an archival publication. HCOMP/CI 2026, for example, distinguishes archival full papers from website-only talks. RecSys 2026 identifies availability of its ACM Digital Library proceedings as the official publication date, which can be up to two weeks before the conference begins.
Do not infer indexing from an organizer or publisher’s name. The IEEE Computer Society Technical Meeting Handbook 2025 says proceedings are submitted for possible inclusion in IEEE Xplore and warns that no conference, workshop, event, or publisher can guarantee inclusion in IEEE Xplore or indexing by IEEE partners; IEEE volunteers may conduct quality review of conference content. If discoverability matters to your decision, look for the exact publication arrangement and any qualification in the current event materials.
Confirm the rules and logistics for this edition
Before treating a venue as a viable option, check its current edition’s dates, formatting rules, presentation requirements, registration conditions, and charges. These details can change between years and tracks, so use official materials rather than an old call, calendar listing, or another conference’s policy.
- Submission eligibility: Check simultaneous-submission and prior-publication rules, anonymity requirements, authorship rules, and any ethics or human-subjects requirements relevant to the work.
- Presentation: Confirm whether an author must attend and present, and what happens to an accepted paper if no author can do so. RecSys 2026 says a paper not presented by an author may be removed from proceedings at the program chairs’ discretion.
- Registration and attendance: HCOMP/CI 2026 requires at least one author to register by the early-registration deadline and requires in-person attendance except in exceptional circumstances. These are conditions for that edition, not general conference rules.
- Cost and access: Check registration, travel, and any publication or open-access charge, as well as whether an institution may cover a charge. The amount and availability depend on the particular event and author circumstances.
- Deadlines and format: Confirm the deadline, time zone, page or word limit, template, anonymization steps, and required supplementary materials in the live call.
Make the decision in two passes
Use the comparison sheet to eliminate options that fail a must-meet condition, then choose among the remaining venues based on the paper’s goals and the team’s constraints.
Quick Recap
- Screen for feasibility: Remove venues whose scope, track eligibility, submission rules, deadline, or presentation requirements do not fit the manuscript and author team.
- Assess scholarly fit: Compare the review criteria and expected evidence with the paper’s actual contribution. Prefer a venue where the intended audience can understand and use the result.
- Compare the publication record: Decide whether an archival proceedings paper, DOI, named digital library, or a non-archival presentation outcome matches the team’s goals.
- Weigh preferences: Use rankings, community visibility, review depth, location, and cost to distinguish candidates that already satisfy the essential conditions.
- Recheck before submission: Open the current call and policies again, since requirements and arrangements are edition-specific.
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