Does anyone know the difference between "peer reviewed for paper selection/acceptance" versus "peer review for publication" in regards to conference proceedings? Is there even such a thing?
Usually, peer review for selection is just a fancy way of saying that a committee will pick through the manuscripts or sometimes just the abstracts before selecting the ones they think are good enough to present. Peer review for publication is where the finished post-presentation manuscript is sent to a reviewer for full review before being published in a volume of the conference proceedings. Unless your field is computer science, where the field moves so fast that conference proceedings are just as valuable if not more so than journals, seriously consider getting audience feedback from the conference but saving your final manuscript to submit to a journal for publication instead. It's 'worth' more as the standards and practices with journals are known to be higher. Conference proceedings that are reviewed are usually 'single-blind', where you don't know the reviewer's name, but they don't know yours. The reviewer will usually be drawn from the conference committee, and is sometimes just the conference organiser himself or herself. In contrast, for a journal, it's usually 'double-blind', where your manuscript is anonymised, and the journal sends it out for review to one, or usually two, of the world's experts in that field. The feedback one gets is much more valuable, and usually results in a better finished publication. Note that this applies to proper, well-established journals - don't submit it to some predatory publisher. Hope it goes well!
Thanks for the reply. My field is computer science. I'm working on my dissertation and have been using some conference papers as sources. I was told I could use conference papers if they were peer reviewed. Now I'm told they have to be peer reviewed "for publication." I'm just trying to understand the different types of peer review. For example, I've been told by my school that the Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) is not peer reviewed "for publication" so I cannot use any of the papers in my dissertation (unless they go on to be in a journal). Here is an excerpt from the ICSE website on the review process for the conference. "The reviewing model for ICSE 2015 is depicted in the following figure. It involves two program co-chairs and two committees, the Program Committee (PC) and the Reviewing Committee (RC) working in concert. The process starts with a cursory submission review by the chairs for format and scope compliance. It is followed by a first reviewing phase where PC and RC members will provide a total of two reviews per paper (every submission will receive at least one review from a PC member in this phase). Papers with at least one supportive review will advance to the second phase. During the second phase, PC members will be assigned to perform a third review. This will be followed by an online discussion to clarify reviewers’ positions, assigning an additional reviewer if necessary, and a physical meeting with the PC members and chairs to decide the final list of accepted papers." F.A.Q. This seems like a fairly significant review process for a conference in it's 37th year. So I guess the distinction is that this peer review process is only for inclusion in the conference. Since there is no additional peer review process for the proceedings they are not considered peer reviewed.
"Conference proceedings that are reviewed are usually 'single-blind', where you don't know the reviewer's name, but they do know yours." My mistake in my post above. jam937, I hope you have a good conference!
