How to Prepare an Outstanding Journal Club Presentation

How to Prepare an Outstanding Journal Club Presentation By: Sooad K. Al-Daihan

What About Journal Club? ü Learn about different fields within your specility. ü Develop depth in selected topics by reading milestone papers. ü Keep informed about new development. ü Foster discussion and interaction. ü Help students to develop analytical and presentation skills. ü Journal Club Talk is different.

Objective Attitudes. Knowledge Skills

Two approaches to Journal Club ü Reading and interpreting (with a critical eye) the literature you have. ü Find an answer to a scientific question. “If you don’t ask questions, you will never learn anything. ”

“Fuzzy Questions lead to fuzzy answers. ”

Journal Club Tips ü Journal clubs can play a valuable part of your time in graduate level: i. promote critical thinking skills ii. dissemination of scientific information iii. generate novel research ideas. iv. They allow faculty and students at varying stages of education to interact and discuss topics.

Select an article Ø This may seem challenging considering how many options are available! ü Consider articles on topics of interest to you that will generate conversation. ü Also consider topics that report original research …variety is a good thing! ü You should also be aware of how much information the audience will have. ü Articles presenting straightforward methods might be better for the first year students. ü Once you’ve narrowed down the pool of options to a few articles, you might ask yourself several questions regards methods, previous knowledge. . etc.

Prepare yourself ü Read the article critically. Consider hypothesis, study design, bias, methods of analyses used, etc. ü Write out what the authors did, what results they got, and what they concluded. ü Think about each of the decisions the investigators made in designing the study, and what they concluded from the results. Were these good design decisions? Were the conclusions reasonable? What are possible problems with the design, sampling, measurements, and so on? How likely are these problems? How would they impact on the results and conclusions?

Continue… ü Pick out a few MAIN POINTS OR CONCEPTS that you think are most important in reading this study critically. Examples of these sorts of concepts are: bias in measurement of outcome, loss to follow-up, unrepresentative subjects …etc. ü It’s a good idea to keep the Guidelines to Reviewing Journal Articles on hand while you go through the article.

Present the article ü Be prepared to describe what you’ve read in a few sentences at the start of the Journal Club meeting. ü Even people that have read the article will appreciate a brief synopsis of the main points before you dive into more in-depth assessments. ü Give some thought to how you can present the article it in a way that makes sense to your discussion. . Remember: the group has a range of experience

Summarize and process Ø That is the most important measure of learning: learn some information and/or skills from the time spent on reviewing the article