Do proceedings papers in science fields have higher impacts than those in the field of social science and humanities?

PurposeThis study aims to compare the impacts of proceedings papers in the fields of social science and humanities (SSH) and science.Design/methodology/approachThis study involved not only citations but also altmetric indexes to compare the impacts of proceedings papers among multiple disciplines with 1,779,166 records from Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) in the Web of Science (WoS) in the period of 2013–2017. The mean value, concentration ratio, Lorenz curves and correlation analysis are utilized into the comparative analysis.Findings(1) Proceedings papers in science fields had higher scholarly impacts than those in SSH fields. (2) As for societal impact, clinical, pre-clinical and health still ranked first, whereas physical science and engineering and technologies were transcended by SSH fields, which is different from the scholarly impact of proceedings papers. (3) As for proceedings papers, citations and altmetric indexes have weak or moderate correlations in all six fields, indicating that altmetrics can be supplemented when assessing proceedings papers.Originality/valueThis study is expected to enhance the understanding of proceedings papers and to promote accuracy of evaluation for them by exhibiting the multidisciplinary differences of their scholarly and societal impacts.