Rankings
Why?
I give rankings of conferences and journal
as an informal and external information. I do not trust these
indicators, I found them deeply flawed.
I indeed give several indicators to
have a sligthly more accurate view.
I also begin to write the acceptance rate of conferences, to give another indication.
For Who?
The intend is for those who have very little
experience in the field, and wonders how 'good'
the conference/journal is.
It is to be taken as a better-than-nothing information.
Who should disregard this?
If you know about the field, it is better that you disregard
these numbers. Or may be you wanna laugh? Ok, now you can consider that for some
indicators, FORTE is stricly better than FoSSaCS. Or some indicator put some conference
in the A category while other disregard the conference...
Building a better indicator?
There is no european based indicators (at least not in the first page of google).
I guess the reason is that we are more sceptical than asian/americans about indicators.
Still, I guess that building our own indicator would provide a better picture to judge european venues.
For instance, I read in some US-built indicator that since researchors have little money/time,
they prefer to go to conference in north america. Of course, considering less than half of the
researchors are in the US, this is at best a joke...
It seems also that indicators take into account indexing of the conference.
First, it probably impacts 'European' LNCS based conference vs ACM, IEEE, Elsevier.
Second, as more and more very reputable venues (LMCS, STACS, FSTTCS...)
tend to move away from the publisher mafia to
publish their own proceeding much cheaper, steal no copyright,
use internet to store them 'forever', and give a free and easy access
(that is, they are better than the publishers in EVERY respect),
they will also be less referenced.
I think the referencing should thus be higly disregarded,
since it would impact the 'free' conferences vs the commercial ones.