Journal club and post-graduate medical education

Abstract

A journal club is an educational meeting in which a group of individuals discuss published articles, to keep themselves abreast of new knowledge, promoting in them the awareness of current research findings, teaching them to critique and appraise research, and encourage them to utilize research in evidence based practice of the speciality. With so much of market driven research in journals the role of journal club becomes even more vital to differentiate a genuine recent advance from a clever but outright harmful rediscovery of the wheel which has been long discarded. Journal clubs can be department initiated or journal initiated and there are randomized control trials to prove that they improve reading habits, knowledge of epidemiology and statistics, and use of medical literature in practice. Choosing the journal club articles, assessing them and presenting them in the journal club meeting are all of vital importance and as a trainee advances in his training he/she is expected to imbibe the best from his seniors and peers in the club. I a journal club one is simply expected to summarize the research question, the methods, the results and the conclusions and not slavishly read through the article. It is the presenter's interpretation that is more important than actually rehashing the contents of the article.