Does conference participation lead to increased collaboration? A quantitative investigation

Conferences are an important environment for academic knowledge exchange, and are valued by researchers as a good way to increase ones social network and meet potential collaborators. The question we investigate in this work is whether conferences actually influence collaboration between researchers, providing a starting point for joint work. To conduct this investigation, we used the DBLP database containing 640.977 distinct authors, 1.057.207 papers published in 21.354 journals and conferences spanning over more than 70 years. Using the concept of coauthorship as evidence of collaboration, we found that at best only 123.886 collaborations (from a total of 2.685.224, or 4,61%) could have emerged from the authors having met at a conference. This leads us to the conclusion that conference environments do not significantly promote collaboration among participants.