29.1230, Fund Drive Fun Fact: Easy Abs Edition

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1230. Tue Mar 20 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1230, Fund Drive Fun Fact: Easy Abs Edition

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
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Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
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Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:29:52
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Fund Drive Fun Fact: Easy Abs Edition

 
Hey everyone, 

Kenneth here again with a Fun Fact for all of you. This week, we're directing
a lot of our content towards EasyAbs. EasyAbs is a <em>free</em> service we
provide for conference organizers that helps make the process of receiving and
reviewing abstracts, well...Easy! 

We have a large number of testimonials coming out later in the week that we
collected last year from happy conference organizers. I'm here to provide some
numbers (and graphs) for you all.

Since 2008, we have had 1,259 conferences use this service. That's not
counting the meetings that were deleted by the organizers. Over 75,356
abstracts were submitted to these conferences! 

We had 136 conferences with deadlines last year and 7,686 abstracts were
submitted last year as well.

Something that I thought might be interesting to look at is the number of
abstract submissions per conference. I've created the graph below to display
this. The top graph indicates the number of abstract submissions we received
during a year while the bottom graph indicates the number of meetings held
during this same year. The middle graph displays the ratio of abstracts to
meetings for a given year.

https://blog.linguistlist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/EasyAbsGraph.png

While last year saw less meetings than typical, this looks like it's normal
fluctuations from year to year. However, the number of abstract submissions
appears to be dropping. At first glance, it looks like now is the time to
submit an abstract! However, these stats are distorted somewhat by the
distribution of abstracts among conferences.

Here's a histogram showing the distribution of how many abstracts each
conference received. As you can see, this looks somewhat Zipfian with very
high outliers.

https://blog.linguistlist.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/AbstractVolumeHist.pn
g

This is probably a case where it would be better to look at median instead of
mean since the Zipfian distribution has very high outliers. These high
outliers could severely affect the abstract submission count (e.g. if just one
1000 submission outlier was missing from a year, the ratio of abstracts to
conferences would lower a lot). However, significance tests are a little too
serious for Fun Facts don't you think?

EasyAbs is important to a lot of people as the 1,259 conferences that used
this service indicate. If you appreciate EasyAbs or any of the other services
the LINGUIST List provides, please consider a contribution to our annual fund
drive campaign. It's going on now!

You can donate by visiting https://funddrive.linguistlist.org . Thank you!






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