Methodology

Two axes

Both are recorded independently, and the tier is computed from them. Neither is a quality score on its own: a narrow meeting can be excellent, and a broad one can be weak.

Scope — how wide the audience is

• general
• field
• regional
• local

Selectivity — how hard it is to get on the programme

• invited
• highly_selective
• refereed
• open

Organiser type

• association
• research_institute
• central_bank
• university
• government
• commercial

The rules, in order

The first matching rule decides the tier. Order matters: the floors are applied before anything can promote a listing.

1. Open submission → tier 3. If everyone who registers can present, there is no selection to speak of, whoever runs it.
2. Commercially organised → tier 3. A hard ceiling. A for-profit organiser cannot reach tier 1 or 2 however selective it claims to be.
3. Local scope → tier 3. Single-institution or single-city audiences.
4. Tier 1a. General scope, invited or highly selective, run by an association, research institute or central bank.
5. Tier 1b. Field scope, invited or highly selective, serious organiser, and discussants. Discussants are the marker of a genuine research conference rather than a presentation slot.
6. Tier 2. Genuinely refereed, general/field or regional audience.
7. Otherwise tier 3.

Invitation-only meetings: on the calendar, never in the list

The list and the map answer one question — what can I submit to? A meeting assembled purely by invitation has no call for papers and nothing to submit, so it appears in neither, however strong it is. That is a scope decision about those two views, not a judgement about the meeting.

The calendar answers a different question: what is happening, and when? The ECB Forum on Central Banking (Sintra) and the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium are there, because their dates are worth knowing and both publish something you can follow — a livestream, a programme, the papers. Every such listing carries an Invitation only label and no submission link, because there is nothing to submit.

Recurring online seminar series sit there for the same reason, and are listed one talk at a time — the speaker, their affiliation and what they are speaking about — because the series name alone tells you nothing you can act on. Nothing is ever placed from a stated cadence: a page saying “most Thursdays” does not put a single date on the calendar.

One thing is required of these records rather than optional: a way in. A record marked invited with no livestream, registration page or published programme is rejected by validation — a meeting you can neither join nor read is not a listing, it is a name. The tier is still derived by the same rules as everything else; it describes the meeting, not your route into it.

Predatory-conference signal

A for-profit organiser running an open-submission event with no refereeing is the standard predatory pattern. It is flagged on the listing rather than quietly removed — you can judge it yourself, which is the point.

• High — commercial organiser, open submission, not refereed.
• Watch — commercial organiser, everything else.
• None — any non-commercial organiser.

No conference currently listed has a commercial organiser, so nothing carries this flag today. The rule is published anyway: it is the check this directory exists to make, and it should be legible before it fires rather than after.

Every listing, and why

The inputs and the derived result for all 62 conferences currently listed. The reason column is the rule that fired, printed straight from the code that assigns tiers.

Think something is wrong?

Check the inputs in the table above first. If an input is wrong — the scope, the selectivity, whether there are discussants — that is a data fix, and the tier follows automatically. If the inputs are right and the tier still looks wrong, the rule is what needs to change, and that argument is worth having in the open.

Everything here lives in git. Records are plain JSON files and every change is a reviewable diff.

Send a correction or a new conference