The Graduate Student Corner concept was suggested to me last year by Professor Jochen Liedner with the following scope note
“IRSG would like to offer doctoral students a forum to present their research in progress beyond the more formal workshop, conference and journal papers. Many of you have plenty of good ideas, and often the Ph.D. degree time period is too small to follow up on all of them. Peer reviewed papers are also more rigid and formal, and often not easy to digest, so it may be pleasant to lay out some ideas or hypotheses for discussion in a more informal way and place, and for readers to pick up the intuitions and drivers behind your research.
The Graduate Student Corner is an opportunity to summarize some of things that you have already published, raise some questions (including those you follow, or those that you had to pocket for later to retain focus), share informal thoughts and your motivations (what excites you about a research question, why you picked a particular topic), or talk about challenges and ways you overcame them, or tips & tricks for your fellow candidates, Informer offers you a place visited and read by like-minded people at all levels of experience, people that share your passion for IR, NLP, ML, Digital Libraries, Information Science, Knowledge Management and other related areas”
In discussion with Jochen we came up with this format for contributions
- A length of around 500 words, submitted as a Word file
- Something about your background and why you chose this topic
- A broad outline of the way in which you are conducting the search
- What the eventual outcome/impact of the research might be
- What input you would welcome from IRSG members
- Your contact details
In this issue we are publishing a contribution from Pedro Ruas which very helpfully sets a benchmark for the format, structure and content approach we have in mind.
Although in principle the web format of Informer means that we could publish any number of contributions we do need to maintain the overall balance of research vs practice, and so Jochen and I will take a decision on which contributions we accept for publication.
I should also add that the Graduate Student Corner is a working title – suggestions for a section title are most welcome!
The copy deadlines for the next two issues are 18 July and 31 October