1. INMIC’s criteria for acceptance is unknown. Reviews are non-existent or useless. (This year, one of our papers got the review ‘Paper presents good new scientific work’ … hardly a technical comment.) This means that students get a wrong view of what submission/acceptance/publication procedure is like. A proper review mechanism albeit one where the standard is lower but known is mandatory for any improvement. You can’t enhance something if you don’t know what it is.

2. From the point of view of researchers, we know for a fact that the PhDs and those researchers who’ve returned from abroad prefer not to send their papers in conferences like INMIC. While it means that they’ll “waste” one of their papers by sending it to a sub-standard conference, it also means that they are doing nothing to improve the quality of these local conferences. We’re only going to get good presentations in conferences (and a better standard of accepted papers) if these conferences get good submissions. So, suggestion: send your better (if not best) papers to these conferences and invest in local venues.

3. Get rid of some of the red-tape. I’ve been to many international conferences and in none of them were there “chief guests” or stages with frilly chairs or shields presented to invited speakers. Why can’t we bring standards of simplicity to our local conferences?

Speaking from experience, if I never had my paper accepted at INIMIC, I probably never would have been too excited about doing “researchy”-stuff. I am sure there are many students like me who are not born research level material and there is very little that the academic process used to help in inculcating that approach.

Now whether these conferences are actually promoting real science is quite a secondary question for me. I dont think you gain anything from stopping such a conference, and having an easy to get into (and I believe that INIMIC is one of the more difficult ones to get into within Pakistan) for an undergraduate (in his second or third year) might just tilt a student enough to seriously think about a research career. If and when they make that decision, they a) either leave Pakistan for better institutes where they will *have* to get better publications done b) stay in Pakistan to get higher education. It is case b) that we need to worry about and its the responsibility of the academia there to make effort that even the ones who stay only produce quality work (so again pulling up our sleeves and doing something).

Related to our discussion, FIT has a PhD Symposium:

“The goal of the symposium is to provide a unique opportunity for PhD students to open up their work in front of other academics than their supervisors.”

Saad’s point is well-taken. If we want to improve the relevance of conferences in Pakistan, we should roll up our sleeves and volunteer to make them better.

I’m not suggesting anyone go about killing anything (except mimes, maybe). The argument that you’re both making, presumably, is that such conferences play some important role otherwise they wouldn’t be around. All I’m asking is what is that role? What positive niche do they fill?

In this case, this free-market approach that things will fix themselves, seems to be faith-misplaced. The pursuit of self-interest on the part of agents in this system (researchers) will not result in increasing the desired commodity (quality research); as long as these conferences can be propped up as artificially prestigious by researchers, there is no incentive to improve their research.

My point was that, even if publishing in INMIC is just an exercise in self-esteem, that’s fine, as long as such an exercise is needed.

If/when the scientific community sees a need for more focused conferences in specific areas, they will be established. And, consequently, conferences like INMIC will fall off the radar of serious researchers. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such ‘conferences’ taking place every year in the US, and no serious researcher pays attention to them. But, hundreds of people pay for them and go to them.

As for your point about the format of the conference or the padding resumes with publications in INMIC, that simply points to the immaturity of the still-nascent academic-research community. And, in a way, it serves as the metric of academic excellence. I mean, if you see an academic with resume full of INMIC publications, you can gauge his/her standing in the research community pretty quickly, can’t you?

Flip the question on its head and ask: what’s the benefit in killing a conference like INMIC? I don’t see any.

My experience with students in Pakistan is that they are bright and hardworking, but have (in general) low ambition and little understanding of what constitutes good research. Conferences like INMIC provide students with false reinforcement; an accepted paper is a vindication of research. I don’t have a problem with organizing a student research exhibition, but publishing proceedings with the false trimmings of a review process is a false vindication of poor research. The blurb on the INMIC website even calls it “Pakistan’s flagship technical conference”. I’m sorry, but that sends a terrible message to students who publish there.

Presumably researchers publishing at INMIC benefit greatly by having their work published and their resumes padded. So, natural selection won’t eliminate conferences like this one. What I’m questioning is the value of these conferences to the scientific community in Pakistan from a scientific point of view. What is that?

To the point of the scientific community in Pakistan being ready to move past INMIC, I am not so sure that’s the right way to look at it. Besides, if they are, it will die its natural death. Natural selection really works.

There is, almost always, room at the bottom of the conference/publication totem pole. No doubt that good research should be published at better, more focused and reputable conferences, but there is no harm in letting mediocre work also get some visibility, if for no other reason than to simply encourage students, and push them to do better work. Speaking from my experience of publishing a sub-sub-standard paper in a similar conference during my days at GIKI, I can safely say that the criticism we got after the presentation did help us realize how little we knew and how much more we had to learn & do if we wanted to be taken seriously.

And, finally, call me a sucker for all things old. In a state where no two steps are taken forward without someone offering a pushback, I say let the mediocrity of a consistent conference speak for our consistent mediocrity in general.