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Presenting a conference paper after publication?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks,

Is it permissible to present a paper at a conference after it has already been published in a journal? I’ve seen some people do this, and it seemed beneficial both (i) for promoting their work to a wider audience and (ii) for receiving additional feedback and further developing their ideas. At the same time, I wonder whether the limited opportunities for audience feedback should instead be devoted to works that have not yet received enough feedback to become publishable.

What do you think about this?

My sense is that this is fine only if you submitted the paper to the conference before acceptance for publication. Obviously, there’s no way to know in advance whether a paper will be accepted by a journal, so if you submit to conferences and journals simultaneously (which is fine), there’s always a possibility a journal will accept the paper before the conference–in which case you’ve done nothing wrong. But my sense of disciplinary norms is that, in philosophy at least, conferences expect submissions to not be accepted already.

Do readers agree?

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7 responses to “Presenting a conference paper after publication?”

  1. philosopher A

    I think the norm (strong norm) is that you do not present already published papers at conferences in philosophy. In the sciences, things are a bit different. And I have seen people invited to give talks at department colloquia give papers that are already published (of course this is dissappointing to some in the audience).
    In our discipline, conferences are opportunities for getting feedback on work in progress.

    Reply
  2. Michel

    Yeah; only if it wasn’t yet accepted when you submitted to the conference. Because of the lag time between submission and presentation, this sometimes happens.

    Reply
  3. Don’t

    The thought is why would I want to hear a talk when there’s a written and published version that is more detailed and possibly won’t have the “oh this has been responded to in the ‘respond to objection section in the written version’” awkward moment?

    A conference where everyone presents works in progress, it would feel like the person doing this is instead doing a “authors meets critiques” session at best, and preaching at worst.

    Of course, there are even worse ways to do this. I once attended a dedicated workshop, where a speaker just *read* a paper published 5 years ago. I’m too junior to dare to just walk out.

    Reply
  4. R

    Just going against the trend here. There may be a soft norm against this (definitely not a strong norm as another commenter says – I’ve never heard someone comment on this IRL in fifteen years in the profession, the only way I’ve heard about this norm is through this blog). But personally I don’t see the issue. Sure in theory I could just read the published paper but the odds that I’m actually going to do that are approximately zero, so I’m happy to learn about your ideas via presentation, published or not.

    Also, good presentations usually zoom out a bit more than published papers, either by including more motivation than you would in writing, or because the talk strings together multiple papers. Definitely with this kind of thematic talk across multiple papers I can’t see any issue with some or all of the underlying research having been published already.

    Reply
    1. kaninchen

      Huh, maybe there are regional or sub-disciplinary variations then. I work in philosophy of science and have definitely had irl discussions about this exact issue. My colleagues support the norm that Marcus stated, i.e., you shouldn’t submit a published paper for a regular conference talk, although it’s ok if you end up presenting a recently accepted paper due to the lag time between submission and when the conference occurs. I personally try to avoid even the latter circumstance because presenting stuff that is already published defeats the purpose of collecting feedback to improve the draft. Also, a talk that covers multiple papers might be fine for an invited talk but seems to me too broad for a typical conference submission.

      Reply
      1. Norms

        You can collect feedback for follow-up projects! And knowing what’s bad/good about your work can be intrinsically useful beyond the purpose of a publication.

  5. Two questions

    I think there are 2 different questions at issue here; one is what the professional norm is and the other is whether the governing professional norm is good. On the first question, I agree with Marcus that the professional norm is to not present published work (unless you submitted the paper to the conference before acceptance for publication).

    On the second question, I think this norm is bad and wish it didn’t exist. I agree with OP that there seem to be good reasons to present and to see a presentation of published work. There are huge benefits of having a non-journal setting where we can share and *discuss* published work in order to generate further insights and ideas.

    Reply

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