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Prepare For Journal Club

What is a Journal Club?

There are many different types of journal clubs at Roseman. This guide collects resources, tips, and tricks that everyone can use!

A journal club is a gathering to develop the skills needed to appraise new research literature by presenting and discussing a published article.

Journal clubs have a long history in science and medicine but have become closely tied to the practice of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Select Articles for Journal Club

When you are on rotations or meeting with a journal club group, you may have to select an article to present.

Rules about what kinds of articles are acceptable vary, so make certain you follow the preceptor or group's criteria.

Generally speaking, a good article for journal club is:

  • Research - Select original research articles. Do not select editorials, opinion pieces, theoretical articles or general literature reviews. Some journal clubs will allow systematic reviews and meta-analyses, but check the group's guidelines.

  • Published and Peer Reviewed - Select a published article that has been through peer review.

  • Appropriate to the Audience - Select an article appropriate to the membership and goals of the journal club. Consider the relevancy of the article to the audience's scope of practice.

  • Current and/or High Impact - Select an article that is very recent and/or of extremely high impact to the field/practice.

  • Well Written and an Appropriate Length - Select an article that is written well enough to be fully comprehensible. If the whole group will read the article and discuss it, consider the length and time investment in reading the article.

  • Interesting to You - Select an article that holds interest to you and which you are personally invested in understanding well.

Calev S. Journal club [Research Guide]. Farley Library. Wilkes University Pennsylvania. Updated May 11, 2020. Accessed 16 July, 2021. https://wilkes.libguides.com/journal_clubs

Find Articles for Journal Club

1. Search high-quality, relevant journals for their most recent articles. Find the most relevant journals for your field using out Find Journals by Title service. Skim the most recent issues, and look specifically for the original research articles.

2. Search on a topic in PubMed and apply custom date filters (at the bottom of the filters list to the left of your results). Limit the results to within the last 6-12 months. Some articles in PubMed are published online before being officially published in the journal. You may or may not be able to use these in your journal club. Ask your preceptor or advisor!

3. Use an alert or push system to have the most recent articles sent to you from a journal or in a field. There are a wide variety of these, so search around or ask faculty for advice on which are most applicable to you.

  • PubMed Alters
    • Create a personal NCBI account with PubMed so you can set search alerts. PubMed will email you when new results are published that match your search. Check out the PubMed Search Guide for instructions.
  • Alert Services

4. Use Web of Science (or even just Google Scholar) to check the impact of a specific article. Web of Science is specifically designed to track article, author, and journal impact on the field as represented by the number of citations they have received.

To identify a highly cited article on a topic in Web of Science:

a. Conduct a keyword search on a topic until you feel like you are getting good results, relevant to that topic.

b. At the top-right of the results list, re-order the results by selecting "Citations: Relevance" and changing it to "Citations: highest first."

5. Ask a librarian for assistance. You can schedule a consultation or reach out to the library to see if a librarian is available.

Recommended Journals

Dental

Nursing

Pharmacy
  • British Dental Journal
  • Journal of Dental Research
  • Journal of Dentistry
  • Journal of Endodontics
  • Journal of the American Dental Association
  • Oral Oncology
  • Advances in Nursing Science
  • American Journal of Nursing (AJN)
  • Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS)
  • Journal of Advanced Nursing
  • Journal of Clinical Nursing
  • Journal of Nursing Scholarship
  • Nursing Research
  • British Medical Journal (BMJ)
  • Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
  • Lancet
  • New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)

Locate Supplemental Materials

Always locate and review any supplemental material for an article you are presenting. Supplemental material can include more complete data, methods, tables, charts, and more.

1. Use a link to PubMed that is provided by Roseman library on your program guide or our library website.

2. Search for the journal article by its title and access the PubMed record for it.

3. Click on the Roseman logo in the top right of the article record to get to full text access.

4. On the full text page, locate a link to the supplemental materials.

  • This may be in a menu at the right or just above the references at the bottom of the record.
  • Try using CTRL F and searching the page for "supplemental" or "supplementary" or "appendix").

1. Use the Library's Journals by Title search to locate the journal in which the article was published.

2. On the journal's website, locate the relevant article in that journal using their search feature or by browsing issues.

3. On the article's full text page, locate a link in the journal's article record to the supplemental materials.

  • This may be in a menu at the right or just above the references at the bottom of the record.
  • Try using CTRL F and searching the page for "supplemental" or "supplementary" or "appendix").

The Library Can Also Help You With

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