I recently ran across this link to acceptance rates for papers in graphics conferences. The SIGGRAPH chart has some missing years (including the first four), presumably because data was not available. Graphing the trends yields some interesting information:
Excluding years before 1985 (when the conference was still “finding its legs” and acceptance rates were very high), the acceptance rate has hovered between 14.9% (1998) and 23.7% (2007). The long-term trend appears to be that the acceptance rate is flat, and the number of submitted and accepted papers steadily increase. In the shorter term, submitted papers appear to be flat or even declining after 2003, with accepted papers following suit (2009 has the lowest number of accepted papers since 2002). I’m not sure why that is; a 2003 flattening seems too late to be attributable to the dot-com collapse and too early to be related to the big graphics conference restructuring of 2008 (where Eurographics was moved to spring and SIGGRAPH Asia was introduced). If anyone has a good guess, please leave a comment.
I didn’t bother graphing the other conferences. The Eurographics table only has information from 1998 (the conference has existed since 1979, only five years less than SIGGRAPH). From 2002 on the acceptance rate has been similar to SIGGRAPH (before that it was significantly higher). The I3D table is pretty complete; it shows consistently high acceptance rates, between 25% (1999) and 42% (2008). Graphics Interface and EGSR (EGWR in earlier years) have similarly high acceptance rates.