As recent advancements in physics and astronomy rewrite textbooks in a very rapid pace, there is a growing need in keeping abreast of the latest knowledge in these fields. Reading preprints is one of the effective ways to do this. However, by having journal clubs where people can read and discuss journals together, the benefits of reading journals become more prevalent. We present an investigative study of understanding the factors that affect the success of preprint journal clubs in astronomy, more commonly known as Astro-ph/Astro-Coffee (hereafter called AC). A survey was disseminated to understand how universities and institutions from different countries implement AC. We interviewed 9 survey respondents and from their responses, and we identified four important factors that make AC successful: commitment (how the organizer and attendees participate in AC), environment (how conducive and comfortable AC is conducted), content (the discussed topics in AC and how they are presented), and objective [the main goal(s) of conducting AC]. These four factors are shown to correlate with each other. We also present the format of our AC, an elective class which was evaluated during the Spring semester 2020 (March 2020–June 2020). Our evaluation with the attendees showed that enrollees (those who are enrolled and are required to present papers regularly) tend to be more committed in attending compared to audiences (those who are not enrolled and are not required to present papers regularly). In addition, participants tend to find papers outside their research field harder to read, which makes introducing and explaining basic knowledge without the assumption of the audience already knowing the topic very important. Finally, we showed an improvement in the weekly number of papers read after attending AC of those who present papers regularly, and a high satisfaction rating of our AC. We summarize the areas of improvement in our AC implementation, and we encourage other institutions to evaluate their own AC in accordance with the four aforementioned factors to assess the effectiveness of their AC in reaching their goals.

中文翻译：

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预印本杂志社作为传授天文学最新知识的有效方法的调查研究

随着物理学和天文学的最新进展以非常快的速度改写教科书，越来越需要跟上这些领域的最新知识。阅读预印本是实现这一目标的有效方法之一。然而，通过让人们可以一起阅读和讨论期刊的期刊俱乐部，阅读期刊的好处变得更加普遍。我们提出了一项调查研究，以了解影响天文学预印期刊俱乐部成功的因素，通常称为 Astro-ph/Astro-Coffee（以下称为 AC）。发布了一项调查，以了解不同国家的大学和机构如何实施 AC。我们采访了 9 位受访者并从他们的回答中确定了使 AC 成功的四个重要因素：承诺（组织者和与会者如何参与交流）、环境（交流进行的有益和舒适的方式）、内容（交流中讨论的主题及其呈现方式）和目标 [进行交流的主要目标] . 这四个因素被证明是相互关联的。我们还介绍了 AC 的形式，这是一门在 2020 年春季学期（2020 年 3 月至 2020 年 6 月）期间进行评估的选修课。我们对与会者的评估表明，与观众（未注册且无需定期发表论文的人）相比，注册者（已注册并需要定期提交论文的人）往往更愿意参与。此外，参与者倾向于发现他们研究领域之外的论文更难阅读，这使得在不假设观众已经知道主题的情况下介绍和解释基础知识非常重要。最后，我们展示了定期发表论文的人在参加 AC 后每周阅读的论文数量有所改善，并且我们对 AC 的满意度很高。我们总结了 AC 实施中的改进领域，我们鼓励其他机构根据上述四个因素评估自己的 AC，以评估其 AC 实现目标的有效性。