  Background: Conferences bring scientists together and provide one of the most
timely means for disseminating new ideas and cutting-edge works.The importance
of conferences in scientific areas is testified by quantitative indicators. In
Computer Science, for instance, almost two out of three papers published on
Scopus are conference papers. Objective/Purpose: The main goal of this paper is
to investigate a novel research question: is there any correlation between the
impact of a scientific conference and the venue where it took place? Approach:
In order to measure the impact of conferences we conducted a large scale
analysis on the bibliographic data extracted from 3,838 Computer Science
conference series and over 2.5 million papers spanning more than 30 years of
research. To quantify the "touristicity" of a venue we exploited some
indicators such as the size of the Wikipedia page for the city hosting the
venue and other indexes from reports of the World Economic Forum.
Results/Findings: We found out that the two aspects are related, and the
correlation with conference impact is stronger when considering country-wide
touristic indicators, such as the Travel&Tourism Competitiveness Index.
More-over the almost linear correlation with the Tourist Service Infrastructure
index attests the specific importance of tourist/accommodation facilities in a
given country. Conclusions: This is the first attempt to focus on the
relationship of venue characteristics to conference papers. The results open up
new possibilities, such as allowing conference organizers and authors to
estimate in advance the impact of conferences, thus supporting them in their
decisions.
