In my field (and also in most physical and biological sciences), journals are the preferred destination for our research output. There was a time when conference proceedings had a lot of prestige, but they started losing their sheen in the 1970s.
While conferences themselves are doing well, it is the proceedings whose reputation has suffered: the decline and fall have been so precipitous, someone joked recently, that proceedings now rank barely above e-mail spam!
Things are so completely different in Computer Science and allied fields, where conferences rule.
This difference in disciplinary cultures has always intrigued and fascinated me. So I was glad to find this paper by Jonathan Grudin who narrates the story of "why computer science in the U.S. shifted [away from journal articles] to conference publication in the first place."
A key quote:
Technology and a Professional Organization Drove the Shift to Conference Publication
By the early 1980s, the availability of text editing or word processing among computer scientists enabled the relatively inexpensive production of decent-looking proceedings prior to a conference. This was something new. Anticipating that libraries might shelve proceedings, ACM printed many more copies than conferences needed, at a low incremental cost.
ACM also made them available by mail order after a conference at a very low price. Papers in ACM conferences were thus widely distributed and effectively archival. These are the two features that motivated the creation of journals centuries earlier. [Bold and italic texts are from the original]
Are there other explanations for the shift [which, Grudin says, was largely US-centric, and didn't spread to Europe]?
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Thanks to Suresh at The Geomblog for the pointer.