Materials Research Society Assesses the Quality of Meetings
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Materials Research Society Assesses the Quality of Meetings 5000
Meeting Metrics
Each time the Materials Research Society holds a meeting, the headquarters staff and volunteer members measure many numbers associated with the quality and quantity of the meeting, including the number of papers presented, number rejected, attendance at every session, number of papers per attendee, and number of posters and oral presentations. These numbers are discussed, debated, and digested by the MRS Program Committee and the MRS Council to find ways to improve future meetings. In 1994, following a Task Force chaired by Murray Gibson, the Meetings Quality Subcommittee of the Program Committee was formed, and charged with devising a useful set of metrics which focus on the overall meeting quality. Most attendees probably feel that the quality of a meeting is hard to quantify, but they know when they have been to a high-quality meeting. In general, members do not like a meeting to feel too large. This impression requires careful attention to logistics and traffic patterns. A high-quality meeting requires good scheduling, comfortable meeting rooms, good audiovisual equipment, a variety of activities, and opportunities for networking, but perhaps most importantly, a high-quality meeting must contain excellent presentations, both oral and poster. The most effective way to deliver a meeting with excellent presentations is to appoint excellent Meeting Chairs, who in turn select the best symposium organizers for each symposium topic. These choices receive very careful attention from the Council and Program Committee, and the symposium organizers receive substantial help from the headquarters staff. In addition, MRS constantly evaluates its progress on the scale of meetings quality, and here is where the meeting metrics are useful. While nobody expects a single number to capture the essence of high-quality meetings, tracking these metrics from year to year gives an objective basis for comparison which supplements the subjective impressions gathered at each meeting. This article shows recent trends in meeting size and the metrics used to monitor the quality of presentations, and describes several changes being made to further improve the quality of MRS meetings.
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Figure 1. Number of attendees (solid line ) and number of accepted papers (dashed line) at the Fall and Spring MRS meetings from 1990 to 1996.
meetings is shown in Figure 1 for the same period. Both Spring and Fall meetings have grown in size, prompting the expansion of the Fall meeting into three Boston hotels in 1994, and filling the Spring meet-
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From 1990 to 1996, the total MRS membership increased by 20% (from 10,400 to 12,400). The number of attendees and papers presented at the Spring and Fall MRS BULLETIN/JUNE 1997
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