Journal club

A journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly (in person, online, or both) to critically evaluate recent articles in the academic literature, such as the scientific literature, medical literature, or philosophy literature. Journal clubs are usually organized around a defined subject in basic or applied research. For example, the application of evidence-based medicine to some area of medical practice can be facilitated by a journal club. Typically, each participant can voice their view relating to several questions such as the appropriateness of the research design, the statistics employed, the appropriateness of the controls that were used, etc. There might be an attempt to synthesize together the results of several papers, even if some of these results might first appear to contradict each other. Even if the results of the study are seen as valid, there might be a discussion of how useful the results are and if these results might lead to new research or to new applications.

Journal clubs are sometimes used in the education of graduate or professional students. These help make the student(s) become more familiar with the advanced literature in their new field of study. In addition, these journal clubs help improve the students' skills of understanding and debating current topics of active interest in their field. This type of journal club may sometimes be taken for credit. Research laboratories may also organize journal clubs for all researchers in the lab to help them keep up with the literature produced by others who work in their field.

Journal clubs continue to adapt to new technology and methods of communication. Recently journal clubs have begun to take advantage of Twitter allowing geographically diverse groups to participate in a single discussion. The first Twitter Journal club was an Allergy Journal Club run by Dr. Ves Dimoz in 2008. They used Twitter to document the discussion of coverage of a traditional in-person Journal club. This journal club established the use of hashtags to organize journal club comments.

The website www.benty-fields.com provides a framework to organize journal clubs including daily paper updates. This website currently only works for arXiv based fields like physics, mathematics, statistics and computer science, but will be extended to the medical science soon.

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