All people are different. Some can hold in their memory previously acquired knowledge over the years. Others forget them after a couple of weeks. But everyone needs to constantly maintain and deepen their knowledge. Students need it to successfully complete their studies and become popular specialists. Professionals need this to maintain their development, learn new skills and be prepared for job interviews. A group of students and specialists need this to increase and maintain their level of knowledge and competitiveness.



In the scientific community, several methods are used to achieve these goals. These methods include attending lectures, seminars, conferences, personal communication, reading books and journal articles. The problem with reading books and journal articles is that some specialized publications are quite difficult to understand. Moreover, all of us are busy people and cannot always find time to read. That's just the last two difficulties are successfully solved by holding journal clubs (LCD) in a scientific group. But I decided to write about them not only because they are useful for scientific work, but also because I think they can be useful outside the scientific world as well.



If we take the definition of the LCD from Wikipedia , the LCD is a group of people who regularly meet to critically evaluate new scientific articles.

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I had to participate in the work of magazine clubs as a student, but now I “push” one of these clubs. Therefore, in this article I will talk about

• what is LCD;
• how LCD appeared;
• how they are carried out;
• for what purposes they can be useful;
• what are the problems in conducting LCD and how they are solved.

Interesting? In that case, welcome under kat.







If we turn to the Wikipedia article, the first known residential complex existed in the middle of the nineteenth century in the St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He was a club where people could sit down and read magazines. The first formal LCD was created in 1875 at McGill University in Montreal.



But I also have other information about magazine clubs, which was presented by Charles Towns in his book [1]. He described the research activity at Bell Laboratories during World War II and mentioned that “This Lab (Bell Lab) also started something that looked fantastic at that time — weekly meetings among eight or ten physicists and a pair of physical chemists. Bella's lab provided tea and cookies and expected us to discuss the problems and concepts of the latest interesting research. ” Even in spite of the fact that he did not call these meetings as an LCD, it is clear from his words that in essence, these meetings were LCD meetings inside Bell Lab.



It was in this form that I met LCD in some research groups in Germany. Only later did I find out that the head of one of these groups was from Bell Labs. Work on the preparation of tea, coffee, cookies and their delivery to the library, where all the meetings took place and the LCD, was regarded as the most important in his group. LCDs were held once a week, after the regular meeting of the group and discussion of news and problems. The same model of LCD is used in other groups in which I happened to work.



After coming to a new, large and very active research group in the role of a research associate, I took upon myself the support of LCD activity. Just because a person who was the “engine” of magazine clubs in the past, stopped working on them. After that, the students came and said: "we want LCD". And the LCD received a new life in its updated plan.

LCD plan

• LCD in our international group is scheduled for every Friday, and takes one hour immediately after the meeting of the research group.
• Only one article is reviewed at each LCD meeting. The subject and complexity of the articles under review vary and alternate in time in order to cover as many topics as possible and not tire the participants with monotony. The optimal article length for many participants is 3–4 pages.
• At least a week, and, ideally, in two or three weeks, any member of the group can offer a scientific article or part of a book for consideration on the LCD. As a rule, he describes his idea by mail or in person, and I already make an announcement of an article for the LCD and the day when it is planned to be considered. If the article is short (2-3 pages), then the group members should be given a week to read it. If the article is long or complex, then they need more time. Therefore, they should know in advance which article will be reviewed and when. As it turned out later, they read these articles over the weekend - this is another reason to submit an article long before the LCD itself.
• On the day of the LCD, we bring with us printed copies of the article, we project the article onto the screen and together, paragraph by paragraph, we read it and critically analyze it.
• Since everyone is embarrassed to start talking and discussing the article, one of them presents the article, starts the discussion (sometimes asking questions, the answers to which he already knows) and the other participants already take up the discussion.
• All incomprehensible statements and results of the article can be raised by participants in the LCD. In this case, the collective brain of the club members, as well as their knowledge in different areas, help to “brainstorm” the problematic part of the article, decompose it into parts, use the Internet search, and, as a result, understand the incomprehensible part. That is, within the LCD, it is possible to “digest” new information faster and more efficiently than independently.
• At the discussion stage, other questions are asked, for example, “Can we do this?”, “Why did the authors decide to do this?”, “How can we use the information obtained from the article?”, “Is it worth it to parse some topic at the next club? " and so on.

So why hold the LCD?

Taking into account the above, now you can write in detail about the benefits of the LCD. So, holding the LCD helps:

• learn new;
• support knowledge that is somehow lost, if a person works for a long time in his narrow research field, which he may later need in defending his dissertation and searching for work;
• to conduct a “brainstorming” of the work under discussion, to quickly understand and assimilate it;
• remember more thanks to associative memory (“I remember this effect, which we discussed at the club and Richard explained it well by drawing a diagram on the blackboard ...”);
• improve your ability to explain something (and this is, indeed, not an easy task);
• encourage reading of articles, even if this is not enough time, but read because of responsibility for the common cause and "for the company";
• For those who have a language not used yet, participation in the LCD allows them to improve their language abilities.

Problems we encountered and solutions

• the journal club was conducted by the professor and the head of the research group, the students did not want to disappoint him with ignorance of the question and chose to remain silent during the LCD - decided to replace the professor with one of the researchers who himself learns and with which students feel free to make mistakes;
• the leading LCD is the only LCD participant, the rest are embarrassed to participate - resolved by the fact that several people realized the need for provocation discussion and began to provoke it during the LCD;
• some LCD participants are still silent, but they come - partly solved as a result of a personal conversation with them in relaxed conditions, finding out and eliminating the cause of silence (often this is either natural shyness, fear of making a mistake or the result of ridicule from his colleagues);
• the disappearance of some participants - this is not something to be done, but the club should work for those who participate and who need it (we have so happened and there are only those who are really interested to participate and who understand why it is LCD);
• Consideration of LCDs as an unserious event - partially corrected by the seriousness in the organization of LCDs by its leading and, thus, core participants who provoke discussions.

Almost unsolvable problems

There are actually three

• a person goes to the residential complex just to depart there - this is the result of a lack of motivation and is solved simply by his failure in defending a dissertation and not being successful in finding a job; as long as he does not have his own motivation, he will not take LCD seriously;
• a person believes that the topic under discussion does not concern his work - again, the result of bad motivation and there’s nothing to do about it until he does not realize his mistake after the failure of the job interview;
• The information received is forgotten - but there is nothing to be done about it, some forget after two weeks, others forget after a year.

What, besides the above, other authors advise

Cynthia Russell in her work on how to create a successful LCD [2] advises to define the objectives of LCD. It is useful to know from the very beginning when a new person joins the LCD, but if it is done too formally, then there is a risk of scaring the participants with excessive formality. They participate in the calculation of informal communication. She also advises to collect feedback (feedback) after the LCD and ask its participants about what could be improved. This is useful advice, but it should be done so that it does not sound like “What have we done wrong?” In our group, ideas for improving the LCD arise spontaneously and there is no need to ask people specifically.



Ruth Kleinpel [3] in her publication noted that, in the case of a critical analysis of the work, the participants of the LCD reveal the shortcomings of other authors' studies. Yes, it is, but I would add - such a critical analysis helps to learn from the mistakes of others, to make your publications and studies better than other authors.



Geraldina Swift [4] also notes that the LCD helps to establish social contact among the participants of the LCD. This argument makes sense, because it really happens in a research group so that people work in their projects and do not contact other members of the group. This leads to self-isolation of such a person and interruption of the exchange of information between him and other members of the group.

Conclusion

Many of you have probably noticed that some types of LCDs are used naturally in their work. We, as students, read material on the same subject in different sources and then collected a single picture of this material as a result of discussions in one of the rooms of our hostel. But then we did not have a formalized, regular and effective LCD.



I hope that you have learned something new from this note and you can use it in your work.



If you have a desire to read an analysis of the results of the effectiveness of magazine clubs and various LCD methodologies, then you can see the Denadyalan review article [5].



Let me know if you see errors - I will correct.

Bibliography

[1] p. 36, How the laser happened by Charles H. Townes, 1999.

[2] CL Russell, KB Bean, and D. Berry, “How to develop a successful journal club,” International Transplant Nurses Society. Internet link .

[3] RM Kleinpell, “Rediscovering the value of the journal club,” Am J Crit Care 11, pp. 412 - 414, 2002. Internet link .

[4] G. Swift, “How to make journal clubs,“ Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10, 67 - 72, 2004. Internet link .

[5] Y. Deenadayalan, K. Grimmer-Somers, M. Prior, and S. Kumar, “How to run an effective journal club: a systematic review,” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 14, pp. 898 - 911, 2008. Internet link .