When fishery biologists come together at meetings or other large events, symposia are a common topic of discussion in hall ways and during social events. Who is organizing a symposium? Who is participating in it? Will the proceedings be published? How can I finagle an editorship?Increasingly, one hears questions or comments about the impact of symposium proceedings and whether contributions will ever be cited in the technical literature. I have heard several persons state they do not participate in, or contribute to the proceedings of, symposia because they are so poorly cited. These comments, however, are based on impressions rather than any systematic assessment of the impact of symposium proceedings.
I used the ISI Web of Knowledge to search titles of several symposia published by the American Fisheries Society to assess the impact of these symposia. Although there is considerable debate about the use of impact ratings and other citation statistics they do, nonetheless, provide a convenient and standardized means of measuring and comparing the impact of various publications. You've got to begin somewhere, so I looked at four symposia published at least six years ago that would be of interest to fishery managers and researchers.
Catfish 2000, Catch and Release in Marine Recreational Fisheries, and Black Bass have, overall, been modestly successful (see detail below). Each has compiled a citation record that is comparable to a regional or nonselective national journal. The citation record for the Proceedings of the Third World Fisheries Congress is on par with that expected from the proceedings of an unselective state academy of science.
To be fair, a few very specialized symposia have had greater impact that the four symposia featured here. However, these specialized symposia generally have a relatively high proportion of contributions from researchers, rather than managers, administrators, user-group representatives, etc. who commonly participate in the more management-oriented symposia.
My review of American Fisheries Society symposia showed there is a small number of commonalities, across symposia, among contributions that are well cited. I'll discuss gaming the symposia at another time.
Symposium Statistics
Title: Catfish 2000: Proceedings of the International Ictalurid Symposium
Published: 1999
Number of contributions: 48
Total Citations: 204
Papers cited two or fewer times: 22 (46%)
Papers cited 10 times or more: 5 (10%)
Citations per contribution per year: 0.5
Title: Catch and Release in Marine Recreational Fisheries
Published: 2002
Number of contributions: 35
Total Citations: 164
Papers cited two or fewer times: 25 (71%)
Papers cited 10 times or more: 6 (17%)
Citations per contribution per year: 0.8
Title: Black bass: Ecology, Conservation and Management
Published: 2002
Number of contributions: 59
Total Citations: 246
Papers cited two or fewer times: 29 (49%)
Papers cited 10 times or more: 4 (8%)
Citations per contribution per year: 0.7
Title: Proceedings of the Third World Fisheries Congress: Feeding the world with fish in the next millenium - the balance between production and environment
Published: 2003
Number of contributions: 88
Total Citations: 44
Papers cited two or fewer times: 83 (94%)
Papers cited 10 times or more: 1 (1%)
Citations per contribution per year: 0.1
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