&gt; The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups.<p>I just remember how my university, who had some standard and fairly comprehensive subscriptions to electronic IEEE and ACM journals, didn&#x27;t get conference proceedings for some damn reason. From the critically-thinking student&#x27;s point of view, conferences and journals look like two different ways of getting students to part with money with no recourse if the product happens to suck, as academic material so often does.