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.
KEY WORDS
Evidence based practice - journal club - post-Graduate medical education - research
critique
