Journal relevance

As I write this, I am thinking back to the SIGMOD and PODS conferences, held at FCRC in San Diego just a few weeks ago. What again struck me at these conferences is the merit of all of the sessions, whether research paper, industrial, or tutorial. Our field is blessed with several first-rate conferences and a wide range of specialized workshops through which much quality research can be communicated. I’m also struck with the wealth of material in the SIGMOD DiSCDVD included with the June issue of SIGMOD Record , which I received upon my return. DiSC2001 includes 14 conferences and a total of 1158 PDF files; DiSC2002 includes an incredible 26 conferences and 1630 PDF files. My appreciation goes out to editors Isabel Cruz and Aidong Zhang and their editorial boards for assembling this valuable resource, and for continuing to expand it so effectively. In this internet age, where one can access anything on the web anywhere in the world in just a few seconds or communicate in real-time with instant messaging on their computer or cell phone, a common concern is whether those dinosaurs of scientific publishing, the technical journals, are still relevant. This raises the related question of, “precisely, what is relevance in the context of a publication?” In this column, I come at this question from four related metrics, and use ACM Transactions on Database Systems as a particular example, in part because I have access to more statistical information on this journal. I compare this journal with two of the prevalent conferences, SIGMOD and PODS. For many of the statistics, I’ll use the just completed year, 2002.