How to Prepare an Outstanding
Journal Club Presentation
By: Sooad K. Al-Daihan
What About Journal Club?
 Learn about different fields within your
specility.
 Develop depth in selected topics by reading
milestone papers.
 Keep informed about new development.
 Foster discussion and interaction.
 Help students to develop analytical and
presentation skills.
 Journal Club Talk is different.
Objective
Attitudes.
Knowledge
Skills
Two approaches to Journal
Club
 Reading and interpreting (with a critical eye) the
literature you have.
 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
 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
 This may seem challenging considering how many
options are available!
 Consider articles on topics of interest to you that will
generate conversation.
 Also consider topics that report original research …variety is
a good thing!
 You should also be aware of how much information the
audience will have.
 Articles presenting straightforward methods might be better
for the first year students.
 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
 Read the article critically. Consider hypothesis, study design,
bias, methods of analyses used, etc.
 Write out what the authors did, what results they got, and
what they concluded.
 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…
 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.
 It’s a good idea to keep the Guidelines to Reviewing
Journal Articles on hand while you go through the
article.
Present the article
 Be prepared to describe what you’ve read in a
few sentences at the start of the Journal Club
meeting.
 Even people that have read the article will
appreciate a brief synopsis of the main points
before you dive into more in-depth assessments.
 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
 That is the most important measure of
learning: learn some information and/or skills
from the time spent on reviewing the article