Including Extended Abstracts from ACM EC

[brlucier]

Currently, only full papers at EC (the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation) are indexed by CSRankings.

This issue is to request that EC extended abstracts be counted and indexed as publications.

At EC, all accepted papers — whether ultimately published as full papers or as extended abstracts — are submitted as full-length manuscripts and undergo the same peer-review process. The acceptance decision is made prior to the choice of publication format. Only after acceptance do authors select between a full paper and an extended abstract, a choice driven primarily by downstream journal policies in economics (many of which will not consider work that has appeared in conference proceedings). The format therefore reflects an author’s publication strategy, not a difference in selectivity.

Because EC sits at the intersection of Computer Science and Economics, many authors opt for extended abstracts to preserve eligibility for economics journals. This is common practice: in EC 2025, 163 of 206 accepted papers (79%) appeared as extended abstracts; in EC 2024 this number was 157 out of 206 (76%).

I see that this has been raised previously (#7364) and has caused some confusion in the way EC papers are counted (#9379). As the fraction of extended abstracts at EC is continuing to rise, I propose making an exception to the 6-page threshold for EC.

[jasonhartline]

Thanks Brendan and the SIGecom executive committee for raising this issue. It is really quite important to get this fixed.

I commented on another Issue that is marked as resolved, so reposting it here:

As former program chair for EC, I strongly agree that EC extended abstracts need to be counted. It is an error that misrepresents the best papers in the field not to count them.

In many fields, short papers such as two page abstracts are not considered to be the same quality and publication status as the longer format paper. In EC they are considered the exact same as long format papers. They are submitted and reviewed as long papers and they are considered published with respect to CS conferences. I.e. they cannot be submitted again to another archival conference.

The two page format is only to accommodate publishing the journal version of the paper in economics venues which is very important for the interdisciplinary success of the field. It is wrong to punish authors for doing the work to disseminate their papers in econ journals by not counting these papers in EC.

From my experience, the way to tell paper from a non-paper is not the length, it whether a long version can be submitted to another conference.