The Best Conference Announcements Sites for 2023

There are a lot of things to keep track of when you’re organizing an academic conference, and with so much to do, promoting your event can sometimes take a back seat.

Advertising your event on conference announcement websites will increase the likelihood of attracting the best researchers available to present their work at your event. Once you have the most renowned academics listed on your event website as presenters, you can use their names in other marketing tactics to attract a larger number of conference attendees. 

As virtual and hybrid events get more popular, the way that events are listed has changed. Digital events can be enormous in scope – without the constraints of a physical venue, virtual events can often have unlimited number of participants, making it even more important to announce on relevant and popular websites.

What are conference announcement sites?

Conference announcement sites are websites developed to alert the academic community about upcoming conferences. Conference organizers list events on these websites because they are a popular resource that researchers turn to looking for opportunities to attend or present to academic conferences related to their work. 

Many academics rely on these conferences as an important part of their career development, and actively search for opportunities to present at and attend as many conferences as possible. Most of the well-known conference announcement sites provide functionality for academics to register for notifications when a new event is posted that is relevant to their research. 

Because conference announcement sites are so popular, and listing an event on these sites is a standard part of the marketing strategies for organizers, these sites act as a sort of conference database for researchers. Several of them list conferences related to every field of study you can imagine, occurring online and in countries all across the world. 

It’s important to note that just because an event is listed on a well-reviewed conference announcement site, it doesn’t mean that event is real. Fake conferences, or predatory conferences, can also be listed on these sites. If you’re an attendee, be sure to do your due diligence. 

There are two types of conference announcement sites: global announcement sites and industry-specific announcement sites. Both are also a great resource for calls for papers or calls for abstracts, letting researchers know about opportunities to submit their work to be published.

Global announcement sites

Global conference announcement sites are a directory of conferences taking place all across the world. They promote events that cover a large variety of subject-matters, from literature to physics, sustainable development to chemical engineering.

There are many of these global sites out there for you to access. Here are the 6 best ones:

1. CFP List

CFP list is an international database of calls for paper across a wide array of disciplines. Its homepage has a handy map with pins marking the locations of upcoming academic conferences, providing a helpful visual for researchers searching for events in certain regions. It allows users to search for conferences by location or topic, and each conference write up includes three handy, color-coded boxes containing the event date, the abstract submission deadline, and the number of days left before abstracts must be submitted.

2. Conference Alerts

Conference Alerts is a well structured website that lists events by topic, country and city, and allows users to sign up for notifications of new listings. It’s free to list events on this site and users report that the process is very quick and easy.

3. Conference Locate

Conference locate, or Clocarte, is a multi-disciplinary, multi-national conference announcement site that lists events all over the world. It allows users to search events by name, keyword, location, organizer, or date. Clocate users can subscribe to a free monthly newsletter to receive up-to-date information about conferences, exhibitions and trade shows that are related to their expressed areas of interest. 

Event organizers can post to Clocate free of charge, but there are also options to pay $3.49 per event or $9.99 per month for added features like listing creation, social media promotion, registration form links, inclusion in the newsletter, and promoting the event in the most visible areas of the Clocate site.

4. ourGlocal.com

Our Glocal shares information about academic conferences and research meetings around the world, representing many disciplines. It allows users to filter events by year, topic, and country, and has an option to subscribe to their feed to receive push notifications when a new event is listed.

5. PaperCrowd

PaperCrowd lists multi-disciplinary events taking place across the world. It is free to use, both for posters and readers. Event organizers use this site to find researchers to present at their events. It also includes a function that allows researchers to follow one another and see which conferences their colleagues are attending.

6. World Conference Calendar

Similar to the other announcement sites listed above, this website acts as a directory for information about academic conferences taking place in countries around the world. It organizes conferences by field of study, and provides news, press releases and interesting articles that are relevant to event organizers, presenters, and attendees. It’s free for conference organizers to list their event on the World Conference Calendar.

Industry-specific announcement sites

If your event is more niche or you want to announce it only to researchers in a specific field of study, industry-specific sites will be a better fit. Here are the best industry-specific announcement sites for popular industries.

1. Technology: All Tech Conferences

Just like the name implies, this site allows event organizers to list events related to technology, targeting researchers studying software development, IT infrastructure, Telecom, Gaming, Data Management, Cyber Security, and more. It is free to list events on this site but there is an opportunity to ‘boost’ your listing to have it presented on the website homepage to increase exposure. Users can filter events by topic and location. 

2. Economics and finance: INOMICS

If you’re organizing a conference related to economics and finance, INOMICS is the announcement site for you. It lists academic events for researchers in this specific discipline, plus provides added value through resources like blogs, job postings, scholarship opportunities and more. 

3. Science: WikiCFP

WikiCFP is a great resource that lists conferences and calls for papers for science and technology researchers. It boasts over 100,000 calls for papers and is used by over 100,000 academics each month. WikiCFP is one of the more data-driven sites we’ve listed. It analyzes the content on its site and uses this data to list the most popular categories and the number of calls for papers currently available for each of these topics. It also shows how many users are interacting with the top five conferences listed, and allows conference organizers to promote their events free of charge. 

This site also provides analytics to organizers, giving them insight into the number of users that have viewed and/or followed their event posting, plus it integrates with Facebook and Twitter allowing organizers to seamlessly share the event listing.

4. Humanities and Social Sciences Online

Like the name indicates, this site provides a wide range of information specifically targeting researchers studying the humanities and social sciences. The information listed includes journal reviews, article discussions and job posts. The H-Announce section of the site allows conference organizers to post their events, calls for papers, and calls for abstracts. 

5. Economics and finance: SSRN

The Financial Economics Network's Professional Announcements is another great resource for researchers in the fields of finance and economics. It provides helpful information like employment opportunities, journals, books of interest, awards, grants, fellowship opportunities, and links to a wide variety of research networks for a wide range of academic disciplines. Conference organizers can promote their events on this site, and researchers can sign up to receive notifications about calls for papers, calls for abstracts, and academic events related to their field of study. 

6. Software development: DevOpsCon

This site advertises DevOpsCon events – a series of conferences targeted to  software development and information technology researchers. While it does not provide the opportunity for event organizers to post their own conferences, it does offer the chance to become engaged with this community and make connections to target with your announcements and calls for papers moving forward.

Sites you should avoid

Unfortunately, with the recent increase in popularity of fake conferences, whether you’re a conference organizer or attendees, it’s important to carefully evaluate the announcement sites you’re planning to use, or the events you’re considering presenting at or attending. 

Organizers of predatory conferences have become so sophisticated and have so much money at stake that they are now very convincing at promoting their event to appear legitimate.

Fake conference organizers are often large, for-profit companies that organize dozens, even hundreds, of events targeting researchers across all the disciplines. Their websites will list all of these events, so, when choosing sites to announce your event, try and stick to announcement sites that make it clear that the events listed are not hosted by private companies.

Look for conference announcement sites like the ones above – sites that list multiple events attached to recognized, well-known academic organizations rather than private companies. While fake conferences can still sneak through onto these websites, they are far less likely to be included than on the corporate sites hosted by predatory conference organizers. 

Save time organizing your conference

There’s a lot of work that goes into organizing a conference, and it’s important to be efficient with your time and resources. You will save a lot of time and money by using a software platform that manages many of the tedious elements of conference organization for you. 

Fourwaves is a one-stop-shop platform that can boost your efficiency by storing your information and taking care of all your technical needs in one place for one price.

It makes it simple to build a well-organized website that shares all of the important details about your event. Fourwaves keeps all of the important content in one place where you can easily collect and review material, email authors, and publish the approved submissions online. 

It can also manage poster sessions for virtual and in-person events, and build a custom registration system for your event that collects fees paid by presenters and attendees. 

Conclusion

Announcing your conference on the right websites can have a significant impact on the success of your event. The websites listed in this article have thousands of visitors that are potential attendees. It’s worth taking the time to submit to the relevant ones, especially since most of them are free.