An asterisk (*) appears before publications that are subject to highly stringent selection criteria where they were published. Some venues (such as major journals and certain key conferences) are very selective in what they publish and some (such as workshops and many conferences) are not. There are good reasons to publish something in a non-selective venue, the most important of which being that a given workshop or conference may be the best place at which to expose a particular piece of work to the scientific community. However, the mere appearance of a piece of work in a non-selective venue says little if anything about the quality of the work. In contrast, getting a piece of work into a highly selective venue is a mark of distinction that says a lot about the quality of the work in the eyes of the scientific community.

As a basis for assessing the selectivity of various venues, the list above uses acceptance rates. For instance, certain key conferences such as CHI, ICCV, and SIGGRAPH accept only 20% or less of the papers submitted to them, rejecting many papers that in fact describe fine work. In contrast, many workshops and regional conferences accept 80% or more of the papers submitted, taking everything but the truly awful. The list above puts an asterisk before a conference or workshop paper only if the acceptance rate was less than 25%, or the paper received a best paper award. In addition, asterisks appear before papers in major archival Journals.