Conferences are often treated primarily as venues for presenting work, but their real long-term value frequently lies elsewhere — in the conversations that happen between sessions, over coffee, and at social events. Scholars who approach conferences with a deliberate networking strategy tend to build collaborations, receive earlier feedback, and hear about opportunities well before they’re formally announced.
Prepare Before You Arrive
Reviewing the conference program in advance — identifying specific sessions, papers, and scholars whose work genuinely overlaps with your own — makes far better use of limited conference time than wandering into sessions without a plan. A short list of people you’d specifically like to meet, along with a clear sense of why, sets you up for far more purposeful conversations.
Prepare a Concise Research Summary
Being able to describe your current research clearly and concisely — in roughly the time it takes to walk between sessions — is a genuinely useful skill worth practicing beforehand. This isn’t about a rehearsed pitch so much as being able to communicate your research question and contribution without rambling when someone asks what you’re working on.
Attend Sessions Outside Your Immediate Subfield
While it’s natural to gravitate toward sessions closely matching your own research, deliberately attending a few sessions in adjacent areas often surfaces unexpected connections — methodological approaches, datasets, or theoretical frameworks from a neighboring subfield that could meaningfully extend your own work.
Ask Genuine Questions During Q&A
Thoughtful public questions during a session are a low-pressure way to introduce yourself to a scholar whose work interests you — it’s a natural, professional opening for a follow-up conversation afterward, without the awkwardness of a cold introduction.
Follow Up Promptly and Specifically
A brief, specific follow-up email shortly after the conference — referencing the actual conversation you had, not a generic introduction — meaningfully increases the odds a connection develops into something substantive, whether that’s shared feedback, a future collaboration, or simply staying on each other’s radar for relevant opportunities.
Poster Sessions and Early-Stage Work
Poster sessions, sometimes viewed as a lower-tier presentation format, are often excellent venues for candid, detailed conversation about early-stage or in-progress research — precisely the stage where genuinely useful feedback and potential collaboration are most valuable.
Building Toward Collaboration, Not Just Contacts
The strongest research collaborations that emerge from conference networking usually develop gradually — an initial conversation, followed by continued contact, shared working papers, and eventually a concrete joint project — rather than being proposed on the spot. Patience and consistent follow-through matter more than the initial introduction itself.
Conferences as a Pipeline for Future Submissions
Beyond collaboration, conference conversations often surface useful information about which journals are actively seeking submissions in a given area, upcoming special issues, or editorial priorities — informal information that can meaningfully inform where you eventually submit your own work, including checking a journal’s scope with fresh context from what you’ve learned.
For a list of major upcoming economics and management conferences worth planning around, the American Economic Association’s conference calendar is a widely used reference point for the field.
Coming out of a conference with a paper ready for submission? Review the journal’s scope and submit through the paper submission page.