Using Google+ and Medium for Database Journal Club
Today I created Database Journal Club on Medium for exploring database research field through published journals and research papers:
I’ve been using Google+ for organizing Database Journal Club since 2017 to share interesting research papers among database research lovers. I actually needed a place to talk about research articles in order to keep motivating myself and also keep getting informed about the latest research topics.
Before starting Database Journal Club on Google+, I’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, etc. if I find some interesting database research papers in SIGMOD, VLDB, USENIX conferences, etc., I wrote their short summaries and posted them to these media. Although these media are handy to use, finding past articles has been quite difficult. Sometimes it’s almost impossible. The knowledge I learned from research papers can easily go away as time passes.
I strongly believe reading research papers should accumulate your knowledge. If you write a summary or categorize research papers (e.g., via tagging), it will be a great treasure for you to deepen your understanding about the field and topics. Even if you don’t fully understand the whole contents when you initially read the paper, after several months, you may have much more understandings in the field and knowledges on the related technologies. This enables you to comprehend what is written in the paper, which was difficult to understand before.
Google+ has been useful for posting links to research papers. For sharing ideas and writing summaries, however, I’ve found it’s insufficient for writing detailed stuffs; Putting a summary and what I thought in a small post window in Google+ have not been so fun. Medium provides much better writing experiences, so I decided to use both; for freely posting links of interesting papers we still use Google+. If you want to write more, use Medium.
Medium has a feature for writer collaboration, in which multiple writers can post articles to the same group where they belong. I would appreciate your volunteers or contributions for enhancing the contents of this club. If you follow our Twitter account @db_journal, you also can receive the latest posts in the Database Journal Club.
My first goal is making this Database Journal Club attractive for sharing your thoughts on research papers. As a person who has been working in academia and industries for years I know there is a huge gap between these communities, but at the same time I know they need the knowledges from both sides for finding new research topics and its applications to the real world. I hope this journal club will bridge the gap and will contribute to create great database technologies that improve our lives.
