Slide your cursor on the examples to note the different elements
Conference proceedings and papers/articles may be published in various ways: as separate, one-time publications; as serials; or as special issues in journals. Sometimes it is published by a regular publisher, sometimes only the abstract is published; sometimes the paper may be obtained only by contacting the author or society; sometimes the full text is on the web. Occasionally the papers are never published but may be cited by authors who attended the meetings (See: Informal and unofficial sources). As a result of these variations, locating conference proceedings can be complicated. Examples:
Vissers, C.A., Sinderen M.J. van, and Ferreira Pires, L. (1993). What makes industries believe in formal methods. A.A.S. Danthine, G. Leduc and P. Wolpers (eds.). Proceedings of the 13th IFIP International Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification (PSTV), Liège, Belgium, pp. 3-26Amsterdam, North-Holland (IFIP Transactions C-16)
[17] J. Lamping. An algorithm for optimal lambda calculus reduction. In: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. San Francisco, CA January 1990 16-30 New York (NY)< ACM
Conference proceedings should mention the location where the conference or workshop was held. In order to find a conference proceedings you can combine the title with the location of the conference and/or year of the conference in the Title field (Advanced search). The year that a conference was organized is not necessarily the same as the publication year.
If a conference proceedings is published as part of a serial you can select the search field Series (Advanced search) and enter the title of the series, e.g. Proceedings in Applied Mathematics or Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics
Since a few years all the conference proceedings of the ACM are available online. The same is true with the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, Lecture Notes in Physics and Lecture Notes in Mathematics.
Please note that there are regular journal publications which are proceedings, although not conference proceedings, e.g. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society and the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: mathematical, physical & engineering sciences.
