Assignment:
JOURNAL CLUB
For the Journal Club you will read one publication in the field of science relevant to foodborne pathogens and write a one to three page summary on the paper. You will do this a total of 5 times for 5 different papers. A new list of papers will be supplied every fortnight starting.
The purpose of the Journal Club is for you to try and develop skills in reading and understanding technical information in the field of microbiology and related areas. Also another learning goal is try to better acquaint yourself with the scientific process. This includes how papers are written and formatted, the way the research data and information is presented and explained. Furthermore, writing the summaries is geared to improving your English writing communication skills since it is something you will find very important in a professional career. Since most technical data is communicated internationally via English having excellent technical comprehension and communication skills is a major asset.
Guide to completing the assignment
1. First select a paper from the list of papers provided. You may need to briefly scan the abstracts of the papers to find one that looks interesting to you. Just chose one!
2. Read the paper from start to finish. Do not just skim-read through. If you encounter terms or concepts that you do not understand look them up on the internet so you understand what is being said in the paper. I suggest taking notes as you read the paper in being to build your summary.
3. Write your summary with the following structure:
a) Indicate which journal club paper it is 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 (see Table 1 below for assignment dates and deadlines).
b) Introduce the study:
- Indicate the paper that was studied (give the details).
- Indicate who did the work, where do they come from.
- Why did they do the work - provide a paragraph on the reasons for the research e.g. what is the problem that they were trying to solve, what was the hypothesis (if any) or what were they exploring or surveying.
- Not all papers are the same the researchers use different philosophies (e.g. answering a defined question, explorative, problem-solving etc.) so try to capture that in your summary.
c) Describe the approach
- How did they do the work and why. Basically describe the methods. Did they replicate their experiments or relied on many samples?
- Did they do statistical analysis? How robust do you think the study is?
d) Describe the results in general.
- What did they find? Briefly describe the results
- What do they actually show? What do they mean. What is the significance of the data?
- Basically do you feel the results are good quality and useful?
- Could the experiments be done some other way?
- Would you be confident with the results? This can be shown by comparing similar studies. Is the one you read good in comparison?
e) What did they conclude with their study?
- What were the final thoughts made by the researchers? Describe the conclusions. Did they have conclusions that were clear or did they make little sense?
- Did they answer their question if there was one to answer? Was their exploration (or survey) successful if that was what they were doing?
- Were there "more questions than answers"? This is in itself fine, it means more research has to be done to provide insight into the problem/questions. Thus do the researchers need to do more research to clearly answer their question or solve the problem they are involved with?
The document will be judged largely on the above criteria but also will be judged on some more:
f) The summary is provided in clearly written English
g) The length of the summary must be be at last 300 words but should be no more 1000 words. I want you to write concisely.
h) If you mention other papers to support your arguments these need to be referenced in a consistent style. These will not be counted against the word total.