For a great deal of research, the conference is where it first meets the world. A finding is presented in a talk, a method shown on a poster, a work-in-progress debated long before it appears in a journal — and in some fields, notably parts of computer science and engineering, the peer-reviewed conference paper is itself a primary, prestigious form of publication. Yet the outputs that conferences generate have an uneasy relationship with the formal scholarly record. A poster rolled back into its tube, a set of slides shared only with the people in the room, a proceedings paper that never receives a stable identifier: these represent real scholarly work that too often slips through the cracks of citation, discovery and recognition. This article looks at how conference outputs can take their proper place in the record, drawing on the research outputs domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
The range of conference outputs
“Conference output” covers several distinct things, and treating them as one blurs important differences:
- Proceedings papers. Full written papers published as part of a conference’s proceedings, frequently peer-reviewed and, in some disciplines, the main venue for significant work — carrying prestige comparable to or exceeding journal articles.
- Extended abstracts. Shorter written contributions that summarise work presented at a meeting.
- Posters. Visual presentations of research, often of preliminary or focused findings, displayed and discussed during a conference.
- Presentations and slides. The talks given at conferences and the slide decks that accompany them, which capture how work was framed and communicated at a particular moment.
Each of these is a genuine output reflecting real intellectual contribution. The problem has rarely been their value; it has been their persistence and findability. A journal article is deposited, identified, indexed and citable almost automatically. A poster or a set of slides, historically, was not — and so excellent work could effectively vanish after the event that occasioned it.
The persistence problem
The core difficulty is that conference outputs have often lacked the infrastructure that makes other outputs durable. Without a stable home and a persistent identifier, a poster or presentation cannot be reliably cited, because there is nothing stable to cite; it cannot be easily discovered, because it is not indexed; and it cannot be properly credited, because it leaves no fixed trace. The result is a systematic under-recognition of a large category of work, and a loss to the record itself, since conference outputs frequently contain early results or methodological details that never reach a later paper. Solving this requires the same two things that make any output durable: a stable place to live and a persistent identifier to name it.
Repositories and DOIs for conference outputs
This is exactly what general-purpose research repositories now provide. Platforms such as Zenodo and Figshare allow researchers to deposit a wide range of outputs — including posters, presentations, slides and proceedings papers — and, crucially, to mint a DOI for each one. The effect is transformative. A poster deposited in Zenodo with a DOI is no longer an ephemeral object that existed for one afternoon; it is a permanently archived, uniquely identified, citable output with its own landing page and metadata. The same applies to a slide deck or an extended abstract. By depositing conference outputs and obtaining persistent identifiers for them, researchers turn fleeting presentations into durable parts of the scholarly record — findable, linkable and citable like any article or dataset. The infrastructure that was once reserved for formal publications is now readily available for the full range of conference work.
Citing and connecting conference outputs
Once a conference output has a persistent identifier, it can participate fully in the scholarly graph. It can be cited in later work, so that the poster which first presented an idea, or the proceedings paper that established a method, receives proper credit. It can be linked to related outputs — connected to the dataset it draws on, the eventual journal article it grew into, or the software it demonstrated — so that the relationships between a project’s outputs are visible. And it can be attributed to its creators through their identifiers, so the contribution attaches to the right people. This connectivity matters because research outputs are most valuable when they are linked rather than isolated. A conference output with a DOI is not a dead end; it is a node in the network of scholarship, able to cite and be cited like any other.
Recognition and assessment
Making conference outputs persistent and citable also makes them visible to the systems that recognise and assess research. When a poster or presentation has a stable identifier and clear metadata, it can appear in a researcher’s ORCID record, flow into institutional systems, and be counted as part of their contribution — particularly important for early-career researchers, whose conference work may precede their first journal publications, and for disciplines where the peer-reviewed proceedings paper is the principal output. Recognising the full breadth of scholarly work, rather than only the journal article, is a recurring theme of the research outputs domain and of fair approaches to authorship and contribution. Conference outputs deserve to count, and persistent identification is what lets them.
A consistent vocabulary for conference work
For conference outputs to be deposited, cited, linked and credited consistently across repositories and research systems, they must be described in a shared way — the type of output, its relationship to an event and to other outputs, and the roles of those who created it. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary provides: a shared vocabulary so that a proceedings paper, a poster or a presentation is understood for what it is wherever it appears. And because each rests on genuine contribution, the work behind it can be described in the same shared framework — the CRediT taxonomy. The conference is where research is so often first shared; giving its outputs persistent identifiers ensures that what is shared there takes its rightful place in the lasting record.