Academic conferences play a very important role in the construction of national innovation system, development of disciplines and growth of scientific researchers. In recent years, the overall scale of China's academic conference activities has increased rapidly but problems such as uneven quality and lack of standards have become increasingly obvious. Therefore, conference organizers, managers and participants urgently need an evaluation means to judge the quality of academic conferences. In view of the problems of the traditional academic conference quality evaluation methods, such as lack of prominent academic elements and narrow application fields, this study proposes a quality evaluation framework which comprehensively uses the evaluation information sources including participants' qualitative feedback, quantitative characteristics data of the conference, and social influence big data analysis, and conducts a comprehensive quality evaluation covering more than 700 academic conferences held in China in 2018. The results indicate that the scale of academic conferences in China is increasing continuously, that the quality control of content is stricter and the effect of interactive communication is more prominent, and that the types of outcome and dissemination methods are further enriched. However, there are significant differences in quality among academic conferences of different disciplines and scales. And there are obvious differences in the perception of conference quality among participants of different titles and nationalities. According to the evaluation results, this paper proposes three ways to improve the quality of China's academic conferences, that is, considering the demands of participants, optimizing conference organization, and improving the mechanism of the academic society.

academic conference  /  academic conference evaluation  /  quality of academic conference