Journal clubs are
important moments in everybody's lab life.
A journal club gives you the chance to:
* read some recent publications (we all know that you should read more papers, but you often reschedule this activity for tomorrow! A journal club implies that there are no more excuses)
* learn something new about your research area (or discover a completely new one)
* practice your presentation skills
* share your thoughts with the other members of your lab/department
* (hopefully) find new ideas for your project/for new projects.
The articles that are reviewed in a journal club are usually chosen according to the research objectives and interests of the person who presents, your lab and/or the other participants of the journal club. The list of the articles reviewed at a journal club could be therefore useful to other scientists that work in the same research field or in a related one, but unfortunately it is rarely shared with the scientific community.
A journal club gives you the chance to:
* read some recent publications (we all know that you should read more papers, but you often reschedule this activity for tomorrow! A journal club implies that there are no more excuses)
* learn something new about your research area (or discover a completely new one)
* practice your presentation skills
* share your thoughts with the other members of your lab/department
* (hopefully) find new ideas for your project/for new projects.
The articles that are reviewed in a journal club are usually chosen according to the research objectives and interests of the person who presents, your lab and/or the other participants of the journal club. The list of the articles reviewed at a journal club could be therefore useful to other scientists that work in the same research field or in a related one, but unfortunately it is rarely shared with the scientific community.
I think that sharing
this precious list of papers would be a good practice for a
“virtuous lab”.
I understood how
useful such lists can be by browsing the one shared by a group of
scientists at my old institute (http://journalclub.ibis.ulaval.ca/).
Thanks to this list I discovered many interesting papers I was not
even aware of and it turned out that those papers were useful to
develop my current research project.
But is sharing the
list of papers reviewed in journal clubs enough? Well, in my opinion
it is the first step towards the journal club 2.0, but there is a lot
of room for further improvements. Here I share with you some
thoughts.
By
creating a public library on zotero (https://www.zotero.org/) it is
possible to share a list of papers and generate (at the same time) a
library of references that is ready to use whenever you write a paper
(if you do not use zotero as reference manager, you can still convert
the library to another format, I guess).
Further, in zotero
you can add notes and tags to each entry. Tags are useful to search
specific papers when your library will have hundreds of entries.
Notes are even more useful. You really understand a paper when you
are capable to summarize it. Use the notes to summarize the paper
after you read it, write down ideas, comments and describe why this
paper is important (of course be careful of what you share in order
to avoid being scooped!).
Another advice is to
set as a rule to choose, at least once every five journal clubs an
article that is not strictly related to what you are working on. It
can be a review, a work you like on another bug/organism, or a paper
that you think can help you and the other participants of the journal
club broadening your scientific perspective.
Finally, remember to
spend 1-2 hours every month to keep you library up-to-date and review
the old papers.
That’s it!
However, I cannot conclude this post without sharing the list of
papers that my lab mates and I reviewed during journal clubs:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/1911042/farhatlab_public/items
. These papers are mainly useful for scientists that study antibiotic
resistance and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Journal clubs are
much more than annoying moments in which somebody presents a paper
you do not even care about. Try to get the best out of them.
