The role of conferences on the pathway to academic impact: Evidence from a natural experiment

We provide evidence for the effectiveness of conferences in promoting academic impact, by exploiting the cancellation—due to “Hurricane Isaac”—of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. We assembled a dataset of 29,142 articles and quantified conference effects, using difference-in-differences regressions. Within four years of being presented at the conference, an article's likelihood of becoming cited increases by five percentage points. We decompose the effects by authorship and provide an account of the underlying mechanisms. Overall, our findings point to the role of short term face-to-face interactions in the formation and dissemination of scientific knowledge.