Does the Venue of Scientific Conferences Leverage their Impact? A Large Scale study on Computer Science Conferences

Background: Conferences bring scientists together and provide one of the most timely means for disseminating new ideas and cutting-edge works.The importance of conferences in scientific areas is testified by quantitative indicators. In Computer Science, for instance, almost two out of three papers published on Scopus are conference papers. Objective/Purpose: The main goal of this paper is to investigate a novel research question: is there any correlation between the impact of a scientific conference and the venue where it took place? Approach: In order to measure the impact of conferences we conducted a large scale analysis on the bibliographic data extracted from 3,838 Computer Science conference series and over 2.5 million papers spanning more than 30 years of research. To quantify the "touristicity" of a venue we exploited some indicators such as the size of the Wikipedia page for the city hosting the venue and other indexes from reports of the World Economic Forum. Results/Findings: We found out that the two aspects are related, and the correlation with conference impact is stronger when considering country-wide touristic indicators, such as the Travel&Tourism Competitiveness Index. More-over the almost linear correlation with the Tourist Service Infrastructure index attests the specific importance of tourist/accommodation facilities in a given country. Conclusions: This is the first attempt to focus on the relationship of venue characteristics to conference papers. The results open up new possibilities, such as allowing conference organizers and authors to estimate in advance the impact of conferences, thus supporting them in their decisions.