It doesn’t have to be called journal club, but attending a weekly meeting where you discuss scientific papers with other people will help your development a lot. Journal clubs are the best way to gain a feeling of how research is done outside your lab, which may not always be the optimal way.
General structure is that one person per week picks a paper and sends it to everyone else in the group. Everyone reads the paper before the meeting, and then the person who picked the paper chairs an informal discussion by going through the figures and the conclusions.
Get Practical Tips- If someone else is presenting, then you should still read the paper. You won’t have time to analyse the figures properly during the presentation.
- If your institute or group doesn’t have a journal club then set one up yourself. Send an email around asking who would like to be involved.
- It’s generally better if there are a few people of more experience present who can point out inaccurate methods or invalid conclusions that students might not know.
- When you are reading the article, look at the figures first, then conclude what the paper shows before reading the authors conclusion. You might be surprised at how different it is.
- Sometimes if you have time you could look at a few reviews on the subject to see how the data ties in with other papers, especially if it is related to your own research.
- At some points your life will be too busy for all these extra activities, but put off that moment for as long as possible as they really do help.
Read Personal Perspective
If there was one activity I would recommend to anyone, it’s journal club. Seeing the differences between the high and low impact papers and analysing them in detail helped me avoid the same mistakes and improved the quality of my research.
