I presented the paper at an international conference that took place in my country. The conference publishes a newsletter, and my abstract is published in that newsletter, but the conference gathering was very small, and not many people from the international scientific community would ever read it. However, I am not sure if I can present my findings again at an international conference outside my country. The title and content of the abstracts submitted to these two conferences are totally different, but they discuss the same findings. Please let me know if I can contact the organizers and share my concern. Also, it was mentioned on the conference webpage that the abstract submitted should be unpublished. Does it mean that these findings shouldn't be published in international peer-reviewed journals, or is it about the conference abstract booklet?
1 Answer
There are two concerns. First is whether another venue will "publish" your work if it has already be "published" in some form. It is unlikely that an abstract will be an issue here, but a full paper might be. That is a decision of each conference organization and you can contact them for guidance.
The other issue is self-plagiarism. If you have published something and want to then publish a more complete or different version, cite the original, just as you would the work of another author. This way the readers of your work don't get the impression that this is the first appearance and they also have access to the complete context of the ideas, including what you might have cited or referenced in the first version but not the second.
But in any case, publishing an abstract doesn't prevent you from later publishing the complete work or even a similar but derived work. Just maintain the thread of context through the various versions.
