About Conference Record of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference

Conference Record of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC)

Quick Facts

Overview: What This Publication Actually Is

The Conference Record of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference is the published proceedings — historically titled the 'Conference Record' — of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, universally known as PVSC. PVSC is the longest-running technical conference devoted to photovoltaics, solar cells and solar power, and its Conference Record is the archival trace of that meeting from 1961 to the present. The classification matters: this is a conference proceedings series, catalogued in the ISSN system as a serial (ISSN 0160-8371) because it appears for each edition of the conference, but it is not a journal. It has no rolling submissions or journal editor, no article processing charge, and no Journal Impact Factor, and its papers should be cited and evaluated as conference papers.

Photovoltaics — the direct conversion of light into electricity — began as a technology for space: solar cells were the practical power source for satellites, and the first PVSC in 1961 was held at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, convening the small community then working on space power. The conference's own history, as its chairs recount it, is of a meeting that grew with its industry: terrestrial applications entered the programme in the early 1970s, and the technical areas multiplied until, in recent decades, the programme has covered around ten or eleven distinct areas spanning fundamental materials science to module reliability, manufacturing and markets. Through that growth the Conference Record remained the single continuous publication in which the field's progress was reported year by year.

That continuity gives the series unusual documentary value. PVSC is where the photovoltaics community has traditionally announced its headline results — record solar-cell efficiencies, new technology families such as perovskites, TOPCon, heterojunction and tandem cells, and newly recognised degradation phenomena such as potential-induced degradation and light- and elevated-temperature-induced degradation (LeTID) are all examples its chroniclers cite of breakthroughs first aired at this conference. A researcher reconstructing, say, the efficiency trajectory of a cell architecture or the community's discovery of a failure mechanism will repeatedly land in these volumes.

The proceedings are published by IEEE in the United States; modern papers carry IEEE DOIs in the 10.1109/PVSC.* pattern and are distributed through IEEE's digital library, while the ISSN record (maintained by the United States ISSN Center, last modified in September 2024) lists the title as a print serial with an online medium as well, CODEN CRCNDP, and notes the 38th edition (2012) as the latest consulted for that record. Each edition's record is also a substantial physical artefact — hundreds of technical presentations; the 34th conference in Philadelphia in 2009, for instance, reported 654 technical presentations and record attendance for the event at that time.

History and Development

The conference's location history reads as a history of the solar industry's geography. The first meetings were in Washington, DC (1961–1963); the 6th conference in 1967 at Cocoa Beach, Florida, was the first solely sponsored by IEEE; the 9th, in 1972 at Silver Spring, Maryland, was the first to include a session on terrestrial photovoltaics — the moment the field's centre of gravity began shifting from satellites to rooftops and power plants. Thereafter the meeting rotated through American solar centres — Palo Alto, Scottsdale, Baton Rouge, San Diego, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Louisville, Anaheim, Austin, Tampa, Philadelphia, Denver, Seattle and others — with the 52nd edition held in Seattle in June 2024 and the 53rd scheduled for Montreal, Canada, in June 2025.

Every eight-or-so years the rhythm changes: PVSC is one of the three hosts of the quadrennial World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion (WCPEC), together with the Asian-Pacific PVSEC and the European EU PVSEC. The 24th PVSC in 1994, held at Waikoloa Village, Hawaii, doubled as the first World Conference, and the 27th, in Vienna in 1998, as the second. In World Conference years the PVSC record effectively becomes the world community's joint record, and those volumes are correspondingly larger and more international.

The conference's signature honour is the William R. Cherry Award, instituted in 1980 shortly after Cherry's death and named for a founder of the photovoltaic community who, in the 1950s, helped establish solar cells as the power source for space satellites and championed terrestrial photovoltaics. Sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society together with the conference, the award recognises an individual engineer or scientist for a career devoted to advancing the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion; it is presented at the PVSC opening ceremony with a dedicated Cherry Award talk, and its roll of recipients — announced annually by the Electron Devices Society, with, for example, the 2024 award going to a LONGi research leader credited with multiple silicon cell efficiency world records — doubles as a who's-who of the field's history. A second honour, the IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award, recognises earlier-career contributions.

Aims and Scope

The Conference Record publishes the peer-reviewed technical programme of PVSC: original research and engineering on every aspect of photovoltaic science and technology, from basic materials and device physics to installed system performance, reliability and the industry's economics. The conference describes its mission as uniting the field's leading scientists, engineers and stakeholders to present the latest research and start new collaborations — and, increasingly, to cultivate the next generation through student and jobs programmes.

The programme is organised into technical areas, whose exact labels evolve as the field does. The areas announced for editions in the 2010s, representative of the series' scope, are:

• Fundamentals and new concepts — device physics and concepts for future-generation conversion technologies.
• Thin-film technologies — chalcogenide (CIGS, CdTe) thin-film cells and related materials, thin-film silicon-based photovoltaics, and organic photovoltaics.
• III–V and concentrator technologies — multijunction and high-efficiency devices for space and concentrator systems.
• Crystalline silicon photovoltaics — the industry's dominant technology: wafers, cells, passivation, architectures such as PERC, TOPCon and heterojunction, and manufacturing.
• Space technologies — cells and arrays for spacecraft power, the conference's original subject.
• Characterisation methods — measurement science for cells, modules and materials, including advances in characterisation of photovoltaics.
• PV modules and terrestrial systems — module design, systems engineering, performance and field behaviour.
• Reliability of PV — degradation mechanisms, accelerated testing, lifetime prediction and field-failure analysis, an area added as the deployed fleet aged.
• PV velocity / markets — the forum on accelerating the PV economy: manufacturing scale-up, policy and market dynamics.

Later programmes have accommodated the field's newest fronts — perovskite and tandem devices prominent among them — within and across these areas. A paper fits PVSC when it advances photovoltaic conversion, measurement or deployment in a way the community can build on: a verified efficiency result, a mechanism explained, a manufacturing step improved, a degradation mode characterised, or a system-level finding from real installations.

Publication Details

The ISSN Portal record for this title gives ISSN 0160-8371 (which is also the linking ISSN, ISSN-L), CODEN CRCNDP, country of publication United States, and print as the recorded medium with an online medium also existing. The publisher is IEEE. Frequency is annual, following the conference, which is normally held in late spring or early summer. Individual papers in modern volumes carry IEEE DOIs (the 10.1109/PVSC.* pattern visible from at least the 2000 volume onward). Title variants recorded by the ISSN Center are 'IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference' and 'PVSC' — the variants under which the record is also frequently cited.

There is no article processing charge and no open-access mandate for the series; access to papers follows IEEE's distribution arrangements, and conference registration — the usual route by which a paper reaches the programme — is set per edition. No Journal Impact Factor exists for this title, and any listing that assigns one is confusing a proceedings series with a journal. Citation-based indicators produced by third-party aggregators for the series vary by source and year and should be quoted only with their source and year attached.

Editorial and Governance

PVSC is an IEEE conference sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society and the IEEE Photonics Society. Each edition is run by an organising committee — a general chair, programme leadership organising review across the technical areas, and the standing Cherry and international committees the conference maintains — and the Conference Record is the output of that peer-review structure: authors submit technical abstracts (recent editions have used an abstract-first process, with deadlines early in the calendar year for a June conference), accepted work is presented at the meeting, and the resulting papers form the record.

The Electron Devices Society's role is visible in the conference's honours system: it co-sponsors the William R. Cherry Award, administers nominations (with a January nomination deadline in its award cycle), and presents the award at the PVSC opening ceremony. Historically, the conference has also maintained a pipeline from its programme into the archival journal literature: calls for papers have stated that abstracts of particularly strong merit would be considered for inclusion in the peer-reviewed IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics. That journal is a separate publication with its own review process, and a PVSC paper must never be cited as if it were a Journal of Photovoltaics article.

Indexing and Abstracting

As an IEEE conference proceedings series distributed through IEEE's digital library, the Conference Record sits inside the standard engineering indexing ecosystem: its papers are individually indexed with their DOIs, the series is catalogued by the ISSN network (record last modified 2024), and aggregator records track it in Scopus-based bibliometrics, where it functions as one of the most heavily cited conference sources in energy research. Authors needing confirmation that a specific edition is indexed for an institutional requirement should check that edition in the database concerned, since database coverage of conference series is verified title by title and year by year.

Citation practice: cite the individual paper, with the conference name, edition or year, and the DOI. Because older literature cites the series as 'Conference Record of the … IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference' while newer papers are cited under the conference name alone, searchers tracing a citation should try both forms, plus the PVSC acronym, before concluding a paper is missing.

How to Submit and Participate

Submission is to the conference. The established pattern is: the call for papers opens in the autumn before the conference; authors submit a technical abstract by the announced deadline (February deadlines are typical in the editions documented here); the programme committee reviews submissions within the technical areas; accepted authors present at the June conference — orally or as posters — and their papers appear in the Conference Record. Tutorials (a full day in some editions, taught by field experts), an industrial exhibition, student programmes with reduced fees and best-student-presentation awards, and a PV jobs programme round out participation routes for non-authors.

Prospective authors should prepare results the community can verify: independently confirmed efficiency claims where records are asserted, clear statements of device area and measurement conditions, stability data for emerging materials, and field data rather than extrapolation for reliability claims. PVSC's long memory makes it a demanding but rewarding venue — a result announced here enters a record that the field has kept continuously since 1961 and demonstrably still reads.

Audience and Use

The Conference Record serves photovoltaic researchers in universities and national laboratories (institutions such as NREL are perennial contributors), cell and module manufacturers, space-power engineers, characterisation and test specialists, and analysts tracking the technology's trajectory. It is used in literature reviews as the primary-source stratum of PV history, in engineering practice for degradation and performance benchmarks, and in citation analysis as the venue where the field's landmark results were first disclosed.

Relationship to Neighbouring Photovoltaic Literature

Three publications are easily confused and must be kept apart. This Conference Record is the proceedings of PVSC itself. The IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, launched decades after the conference, is a separate archival journal with its own editorial process; PVSC calls have historically noted that the strongest conference abstracts would be considered for that journal, but consideration is not publication, and the two must never be interchanged in a citation. Third, in World Conference years the PVSC edition doubles as part of the World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, run jointly with the European EU PVSEC and the Asia-Pacific PVSEC; the resulting volumes belong to the shared world record of those years and are correspondingly larger. A careful bibliography records which of these a given paper actually appeared in.

The record also functions as the field's informal efficiency and discovery ledger. Because PVSC is where record cell efficiencies and new technology families — perovskites, TOPCon, heterojunction and tandem architectures among them — have traditionally been announced, and where degradation phenomena such as potential-induced degradation and LeTID were characterised for the community, later review articles and textbooks repeatedly cite these volumes as primary sources. That role places a responsibility on authors announcing results here: measurement conditions, device areas and independent verification are scrutinised precisely because the record is used this way, and the conference's culture of characterisation rigour is one of its safeguards.

Strengths, Limitations and Best Use

The strengths of the series are unmatched continuity — an annual record from 1961, older than the terrestrial solar industry itself — breadth across the whole photovoltaic value chain, and the authority conferred by its IEEE society sponsorship and its honours system, whose Cherry Award roll documents the field's leadership across generations. Its limitations are generic to conference literature: papers report work at a moment in time and may be superseded by fuller journal versions; review is conference review; and access follows IEEE's distribution arrangements rather than open access. Older volumes, produced before digital publishing, are most reliably found through libraries and the ISSN-catalogued serial record.

The best use of the Conference Record is threefold: as primary evidence in the history of photovoltaic technology, where its volumes are often the first public disclosure of a result; as a benchmark source, where a paper's reported efficiencies, degradation rates or system performance can be compared against the same year's community standard; and as a programme-planning source for newcomers, since the technical-area structure of a recent volume is a ready-made map of what the field currently considers its main fronts. Used that way — with citations resolved to the individual paper and its DOI — the series remains what it has been since 1961: the photovoltaic community's own continuous account of itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Conference Record a journal?

No. It is the proceedings series of the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (ISSN 0160-8371), published by IEEE for each annual edition of the conference since 1961. Papers in it are conference papers.

How old is PVSC?

The first conference was held in 1961 at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, making it the longest-running technical conference dedicated to photovoltaics. The 52nd edition was held in Seattle in 2024, and the 53rd was scheduled for Montreal in June 2025.

Who sponsors PVSC?

The IEEE Electron Devices Society and the IEEE Photonics Society sponsor the conference, which is published by IEEE. The Electron Devices Society also co-sponsors the conference's William R. Cherry Award.

What is the Cherry Award?

Instituted in 1980 and named for photovoltaic pioneer William R. Cherry, it honours an engineer or scientist whose career has significantly advanced the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion. It is presented at the PVSC opening ceremony and includes a dedicated award talk.

Does it have an Impact Factor or an APC?

Neither. Conference proceedings do not receive a Journal Impact Factor, and there is no article processing charge. Selected strong PVSC papers have historically been considered for the separate IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, which is a different publication.

What does PVSC cover?

The whole of photovoltaics: fundamentals and new concepts, thin-film (chalcogenide, silicon, organic) technologies, III–V and concentrator devices, crystalline silicon, space photovoltaics, characterisation, modules and terrestrial systems, reliability, and market/manufacturing topics — with newer fronts such as perovskites and tandems in recent programmes.

Profile marker: DEPTH-BATCH254. This profile was researched from official publisher, society, conference and ISSN sources listed in the accompanying sources file, and describes the publication as the type of publication it actually is.