In the opening session of any conference, the PC Chairs give a brief presentation of the conference. This typically includes informing about the number of abstracts and full papers submitted, the number of papers accepted, the corresponding acceptance rate and some kind of map / graphic displaying the same information by countries.

Usually, that’s it. For the opening session of ECMFA’14 we wanted to give some more (hopefully interesting) data. In the end, due to time constraints, what we gave as additional data was:

  1. Percentage of accepted papers where none of the authors was (or had been in the last four years) a PC member of the conference
  2. Acceptance rates of papers were at least one author was (or had been) a PC member
  3. Number of papers where none of the authors had participated in the community (as a PC member or author) before (again “before” means in the last 4 years)

With the first two we wanted to show that you didn’t need to be a PC member to get your paper in the conference (for ECMFA 42% of papers were from non-PC members) and that having a PC member as co-author did not increase dramatically the probability of getting your paper accepted (acceptance rate for PC co-authored papers was only 10% higher than acceptance rates for papers with no PC member). The third was a way to see how endogamic was the conference (turned out to be quite a lot since only one paper had a complete set of “fresh” authors).

Can I ask you if you would like all conferences to include these three stats in their presentation? And, regardless of your answer, what other data/statistic would you like to know about a confenrence?