  Indonesia has exhibited a unique pattern of conference proceedings publishing
that was distinct from global and regional norms. Conference proceedings are
now an integral part of the major citation databases, and this study examined
their progressive coverage in the context of academic career advancement and
Indonesian government policy. The results of analyses in Web of Science (WoS),
Scopus and to a lesser extent, Dimensions showed an increase in the proportion
of conference proceedings far in excess of global norms and not seen in any
other South East Asian country. In the conference series containing most
Indonesian proceedings papers, there was a recent increase in representation
from Indonesia and an increase in the proportion of those conferences hosted in
Indonesia. Local policy documents and guidelines from 2012 and 2014 appeared to
encourage academics to increase research outputs in high impact internationally
indexed sources but did not make any distinction between document types. The
conclusion suggests that scholars might have found advantage in advancing
through the hierarchy of academia through publishing conference papers that
were quicker and easier to publish than journal articles. The study is
important to policy makers in the area of research evaluation because it
highlights potential changes in academic publishing behaviour by those being
assessed.
