One of the main things we learn how to do in graduate school is how to read. A quick Google search of "how to read a scientific paper" will come up with about 135,000,000 results (I just tried it, that's the actual number that came out). That number is so huge because reading scientific literature is famously difficult to do. The effort that goes into writing these articles is borderline insane. Authors must work together to ensure that every word of every sentence contributes valuable meaning to the paper. Figures have to be eye-catching but also informative and as accurate as possible. Even the structure of the article itself is carefully crafted to fit each journal's publishing preferences. Each of these factors almost always leads to a level of conciseness that requires you to read several other papers just to understand what's going on in the first one! |
All of the above examples are reasons why journal clubs exist. To broadly define it, a journal club is a regular gathering of people to discuss and critically evaluate academic literature in depth. A few journal clubs happen online, through Twitter or some similar kind of outlet (click button above for more info). Most of the journal clubs I've encountered are formal or informal weekly in-person meetings where one or more papers are chosen for discussion a few days in advance. I stressed that last bit because the entire point of journal club is to contribute and share opinions and ideas about the article, from methods design to statistical validity to figure construction and everything in between. The system doesn't work so well if 1) people don't read the articles or 2) if they read them too generally, as depicted in the comic and gif below: