Thomas Söderqvist When I receive a mail like this:
I am happy to announce that the deadline for the submission of abstracts for the […] Symposium has been extended to July 1st.
from an otherwise serious scholarly organisation, followed by
The other good news is that the [organising committee] has been able to secure some funding for students and junior scholars to attend the meeting.
then I think: The extension of the deadline for submission of abstracts to a meeting is not at all good news.
On the contrary, it’s bad news.
It means the organisers haven’t been able to recruit enough interesting submissions in the first place. And why should they suddenly be inundated with a lot of good abstracts after the extended deadline?
Messages like these — and my impression is they are more and more frequent — means either there are too many conferences in the field at hand or that the conference topic isn’t very hot and interesting.
So I never recommend my PhD-students to attend meetings which extend their submission deadlines.
