Starting Graduate Junction
Hello and thank you for visiting Graduate Junction. Graduate Junction was originally launched in May 2008 by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham (UK), Dan and Esther. We have been really encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response from fellow researchers and academics alike. The Graduate Junction Team also includes a number of other volunteers who share our vision and are giving up their time to help Graduate Junction succeed in its mission.
Our Vision
Graduate Junction has a bold vision to bring together Masters, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers from across disciplines and around the world to create an online global community. Graduate Junction started with a simple aim:
- To provide early career researchers with an easy way of meeting and discussing their research interests with others in a global, multi-disciplinary environment.
We created Graduate Junction because it was something we ourselves perceived a need for. At the same time, we were put off by too many sites which include unnecessary functionality and which, because they are profit-driven, are plastered with banner advertising. We have designed Graduate Junction to be simple and to provide only information which is relevant to the research community.
How it all started
We set up Graduate Junction to reach out to colleagues beyond our own research projects. We wanted to know who, if anyone, was doing research similar to ours. Currently researchers have three sources of information about work done in their chosen field:
published literature, conferences and their supervisor. Literature reviews, whilst essential, can only ever reveal completed work, relevant conferences do not happen every week and supervisors mostly rely on these same sources. We felt it was very easy to become overly focused on the specifics of your own work and to lose a sense of what other related work is currently being done, especially by other graduate researchers.
We also noticed that very distinct and separate literatures and conferences exist for different subject areas despite the large overlap between some disciplines. For example, while Dan is doing a chemistry PhD, his work as a physical chemist overlaps with areas of physics and chemical engineering. Within Education, experience has shown Esther that there is overlap with many other Social Sciences, such as Human Geography, Sociology and Economics.
Making things easier
Networking is an essential part of the research process: promoting collaboration, generating new ideas and preventing duplication of effort. Consequently, we thought it would be great if there were a common point that brought together Masters, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers from all disciplines across the world. By making ‘Research Keywords’ rather than ‘discipline’ central to Graduate Junction, we hope to break down existing disciplinary boundaries so that it will be possible to find others with similar research interests regardless of which department, institutions or country they are in.
Be part of the global research community....
Please help us to build the global graduate research community. Please spread the news around your university. Either invite other researchers or contact us and tell us who we should send information to at your institution.
It is important to us that Graduate Junction grows from suggestions from the community itself. We have just implemented some major changes in response to early suggestions. You can expect to see Graduate Junction continue to develop and grow. If you have any suggestions please let us know.
We hope you enjoy and benefit from Graduate Junction.
Best Wishes,
Daniel, Esther, Candice and Heather
Graduate Junction
