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I hate writing journal clubs!!!
Started by mizslovely2010
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Have you taken statistics in Rx school yet?
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I hated them because they were BORING. Most of it is just frigging restating of what's in the article, with most formats not allowing even most basic analysis!
A journal club shouldnt be re-stating of the article. It should be an analysis. I know a lot of places get it wrong though.
A lot of times, its just a brief summary of the statistics and if it was appropriate for the study.
Unless you have a preceptor who loves statistics and want to drill it. ...then good luck.
I'm also assuming its one of your early rotations. Writing journal clubs will be a breeze after a couple rotations. Good luck!
Unless you have a preceptor who loves statistics and want to drill it. ...then good luck.
I'm also assuming its one of your early rotations. Writing journal clubs will be a breeze after a couple rotations. Good luck!
The discussion itself was, generally, analysis. But not the written preparation... those were all just "rewrite the main points of the study in table format", where I had them. Though I only had them in Drug Lit class and during Drug Info rotation (with the same professor who taught Drug Lit). That Drug Info rotation grade, BTW, was the lowest in my entire academic career. 😀 I have never been so bored, and I was looking forward to that rotation, too... my other drug info rotation was much, much better.
If you go into it with the mindset that its fun to point out all of the mistakes and faults of others...you wind up doing pretty well. I just had to go back and replace phases like "because the author was a damned idiot" with "was a weakness of the study" and it was gold.
At least in the molecular biology academia world... the better journal a paper is in, the less likely there are major errors and issues in critical thinking. So a paper in Science or Nature, there isn't as much to say about them (and they're usually more exciting and relevant).
It does get easier to analyze papers over time. Listen to what other people critique. You end up finding similar errors in other papers, like a lack of controls, the paper missing further analysis, etc. If there's a good discussion section, sometimes the paper lists caveats in the research. You can then analyze how relevant those potential issues are.
I mostly read molecular biology research papers, but we do read some clinical research of diabetes drugs in my lab. What I said above tends to help with those as well!
It does get easier to analyze papers over time. Listen to what other people critique. You end up finding similar errors in other papers, like a lack of controls, the paper missing further analysis, etc. If there's a good discussion section, sometimes the paper lists caveats in the research. You can then analyze how relevant those potential issues are.
I mostly read molecular biology research papers, but we do read some clinical research of diabetes drugs in my lab. What I said above tends to help with those as well!
I agree. Drug information was my weak point. I did one journal club on one major study (ACE, ARB, or both) for my rotations and repeat it. Since the studies were major, it was easy to look up a cheat sheet. I know... not ethical.
I don't know if it's not ethical. Maybe if you were being graded on it and specifically asked for your own ideas. But it takes a lot of practice to critically read a scientific paper. If you were able to read an analysis on the study and learn from it, figure out the strong and weak parts of the study, that is a good thing, especially if you could then better analyze a later study.
One of my issues in grad school is that when you come straight out of undergrad, you're not ready to question as much as you should in the biology field. At least in the US, you spend undergrad memorizing and spitting out info. Then all of a sudden in grad school you're supposed to critically analyze scientific papers that you can barely read. It took me about two to three years of really learning what made a good paper and what didn't, and that's just in my field. If I were reading a biological structure paper, I'd still have very little idea on how to critique it.
