Guidelines for Journal Club

1
Guidelines for Journal Club

• What paper to choose?
• How long, structure?
• From where do get the figures?
• What language?
• What are other important indicators to interpret
  a paper?

2
Goals of Journal Club

• learning to understand a paper comprehensively
• increasing the understanding of the own field
• to comprehend new trends
• getting insights into and to understand new
  methods which might affect own work
• learning to present data in front of audience
• to sharpen a critical view on publications
• part of PhD-program for neuroscience

3
Procedure (time table)

• choose paper at least 3 weeks before appointment
• pronounce titel of paper 1 week before
  presentation to allow other participants to be
  prepared
• every participant receives PDF via email

4
How long?

• 40-45 min for mere oral presentation
• (please practise before !!!)

5
What paper to choose?

• how is that topic related to my own work?
• impact factor
• author(s)
• landmark dicovery
• choose preferentially recent papers (less old
  than half a year)

6
What to mention first?
Does titel really headline the outcome of the
paper?
Reputation of authors What contributions have
been made before to the field? What does it mean
to have a lot of authors?
7
What else should be looked at?
8
Explain what thrilled you about the paper-
maybe this work is critcal for your own
work- a great milestone in the field was
achieved by this paper- etc.
9
Indroduction- provide important and
sufficient information to understand the open
questions and problems in the field- prepare
audience to understand the achievements of the
paper - do not sing people to sleep with
unnecessary and redundant information (etc. my
grandma had the same disease)!!!- a good
introduction is about on third of the whole talk
10
Results

• techniques for each experiment should be briefly
  explained before
• experimental background must be explored and to
  be illustrated
• explanation of the rationale and intention of
  experiments
• figures should be explained stepwise
• conclusions must follow the presentation of data
  (etc. the results from these experiments
  suggest) !!
• comments and critiques of experiments are welcome
  at this timepoint
• how can experiments be improved/modified to prove
  a principle in a more convincing way?
• supplementary material must be considered and be
  presented

11
Lens injury activates axonal growth program
c
a
b
Fischer, Petkova, Thanos, Benowitz 2004b J.
Neuroscience
12
Summary/Discussion

• summarize new principle findings
• critique
• a) is the paper all in all convincing?
• b) are the experiments done well (were the right
  controls done)?
• c) what can be done better?
• what contribution(s) does the paper make to the
  field?
• are there new findings which are contradictory to
  earlier reports?
• etc.