Important research results are often published at national or international conferences. Conferences are often advertised long beforehand with programs and calls for papers. Papers are often printed before the conference (preprints) and are sent to participants or distributed at the conference. Papers are also often printed afterwards.
You can search for conferences in a database called ISI. There you can search for subject, author, title etc.
Conference papers are generally also covered in other types of databases. In the reference database Inspec you can for example search only among conference papers by choosing conference proceedings under Limit before you start searching.
Other common forms of scientific communication are so called electronic conferences, which were one of the earliest phenomena on the Internet. They include discussion lists, Usenet usegroups, mailing lists etc.
Kent Pettersson
2006-02-06
