Conferences

Conferences, in my field, lack prestige. Pretty much anyone who sends in an abstract can give a paper at many of these, even some graduate students who might not be wholly ready to present in a professional context. Conferences are great for networking, but you don't want to have a dozen conference papers with only two articles to show for your efforts. Not every conference paper needs to be an article, but you need to have close to a 1/1 ratio of papers to articles.

I don't think you need to give every single article you publish as a paper either. Don't let conferences be the engine driving your scholarship.

Because some conferences accept just about anyone, the audience has to suffer through many horribly bad papers. I couldn't believe my ears when I went to my first conference as a Graduate student. We had a segregated ession with four graduate students, and all the papers were excellent. Nobody attended, except the participants ourselves and the session moderator, a pompous, condescending asshole faculty member from the Institution hosting the event. He told us how we had a long way to go before we were mature scholars. The next day, when I went to a non-graduate student session, i was shocked to see two papers with pedestrian thematic criticism, of the type you might expect of a high-school student, or bare plot summaries. I was so naive that I assumed mature scholars would have nuanced, subtle approaches to literature.

***

If your field values conferences, then those will have more prestige. In linguistics, for example, papers are selected through a rigorous process. You need to know what the value of a conference is for your particular field.