1. Robotics Conferences and Journals
Major conferences
Topical conferences
Restricted general conferences
Major journals
Trajectories for student publishing
Student reviewing of papers

2. Conference Locator IEEE Robotics and Automation Society calendar
Robotics-worldwide mailing list
International Foundation of Robotics Research web site
Technical Committee on Haptics web site

3. Major Robotics Conferences
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Flagship annual RAS conference.
Ideal conference for students, due to breadth of topics, large numbers of attendees, special programs for students, tutorials and workshops, etc.
Acceptance rate is around 40%
Consistent reviewing standards due to the use of a Conference Editorial Board

4. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Jointly sponsored by RAS, the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES), the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), and the Society for Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE, also Japanese)
Yearly, but off-cycle to ICRA
Often used by authors who couldn’t make the ICRA deadline
Structure similar to ICRA, but fewer programs for students
Acceptance rate is a bit lower than ICRA as is the perceived quality

5. Topical Conferences
There are many of these, reflecting the diversity of robotics.
The RAS Technical Committees page is a good source.
Examples:
World Haptics Conference (WHC)
International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR)
Humanoid Robots
Workshop on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robots (SSRR)
Field and Service Robots (FSR)
Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR)
ACM/IEEE Intl Conf on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
IEEE/ASME Intl Conf on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM)
IEEE RAS/EMBS Intl Conf on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob)

6. Restricted General Conferences
The following conferences have high reviewing standards and are hard to get in.
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)
International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR)
International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER)

7. Major Robotics Journals
General purpose journals
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
International Journal of Robotics Research
Robotics and Automation Magazine
RAS Letters
More specialized journals
Autonomous Robots
Journal of Field Robotics
IEEE Transactions on Haptics
There are other robotics journals, but you should try to publish in these.

8. Other Journals IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
Presence
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception

9. Trajectories for Student Publishing
Apprenticeship in a research group, contributing to some aspect of a project and doing enough work to get listed as a coauthor.
You might get asked to write up a portion of a paper that represents your contribution.
Starting your thesis topic, for which you will be the first author when it comes to writing a paper.
Look for collaborative research, where even though you would not be the lead author and it does not represent your own thesis research, you can contribute as a coauthor.
Initially, the supervisor will determine where and how the work will be published.
Later on, you can take the lead in publishing decisions.
If you don’t publish at least 1 paper/year, there’s something wrong.
Also, attend one conference/year minimum.

10. Student Reviewing of Papers
You have to be far enough along in your research to have enough expertise to judge the content.
Start off by reviewing a paper under the supervision of your advisor. Often the advisor will make the suggestion.
Reviewing is the flip side of authoring: if you can’t write well, you can’t review well.
Journals have different categories of acceptance
Accept as is (rare)
Accept subject to minor revision
Accept subject to major revision
Reject, but encourage to resubmit
Reject without encouragement
Summary rejection
Conferences only accept or not.

11. Reasons for Rejecting Papers
The scope is not appropriate. There is not enough relevance to robotics or to a topical conference.
The scientific contribution is too minor. It represents an incremental advance, or represents an application of well known techniques.
The research topic has been mined out. No further publications on the topic will be considered.
Experiments are missing where they should be required. If present, the experiments do not adequately test the theory.
Meaningful comparisons to other approaches are not presented, including possibly a comparative experimental analysis.
The literature review is dated or misses key references. The authors do not understand the field well enough to judge what is a significant new advance.

12. Reasons for Rejecting Papers
The writing is so poor that it is impossible to understand the contribution.

15. Institute for Scientific Information
Impact factor = A/B
Where A = number of times that articles in the previous two years were cited in the current year.
B = total number of articles in the previous two years.
Immediacy index = C/D
Where C = number of times that articles published in the current year were cited in the year.
D = number of articles in the current year
Cited half-life: median age of articles cited in the current year.

16. Personal Impact Measures
h-index: h of N published papers have h citations each
Google Scholar citation gadget:
H5: h-index for articles published in the last 5 years