Journal Coffee - a new take on an old challenge

Organizing a regular journal club is a real challenge - despite there being a generally positive attitude about it around these parts, momentum often flags in a major way. At our lab it is difficult to get a crowd together. People are often traveling, on research cruises, at meetings, overwhelmingly busy with their own work in the lab or up against the deadlines writing proposals and papers - meeting up every two weeks as a group is very difficult to coordinate!

This year, in an effort to try to inject some fresh dynamic energy into journal club, I’m introducing something new - journal coffee (or beverage of your choice).

The idea with journal coffee is to:
a. get people together for coffee, something we don’t do too often anyway (everyone is too busy working hard!)
b. expose ourselves to current literature, in a casual and low pressure setting.
c. Not spend too much time on it - attendees should not have to worry that they’ll get lured into a long, drawn-out discussion they can’t escape. 20-30 min max.
c. identify papers where the group interest is high enough to warrant a more in depth journal club meeting.

I’m not sure it people would turn out to this but I think it is worth a try - in the worst case scenario, I drink a cup of coffee by myself, which I’m going to do anyway so what have I got to lose.

virtual journal club - vocab in context

Ok, I have a plan!

I'm going to post various geomicrobiological vocabulary words to this blog and to my Twitter account. First to Twitter, then compiled once a week to this blog. With each definition I'd post a link to an open-access journal article where the word is used in context.

So for the scientists who follow this blog (hopefully a few eventually!) it could function as a sort of virtual bite-sized journal club. Don't worry, I won't ask you to make any presentations!

For the non-scientists you'll get some insight into what sort of work is being done out there in geomicrobiology and related fields - the kind of work that may not be sexy enough to get into science news but is still exciting (IMHO!). Science literature is pretty heavy stuff to the uninitiated of course, so here is some advice to get you started: just read the abstract, the intro, and the conclusion. They are generally written to be fairly comprehensible to the average scientist who isn't an expert in the specific topic of the paper. So you might have a fighting chance of understanding it if you read those bits, and you won't get bogged down in the minutiae of the methods and results sections. Unless you want to of course!

If anyone wants to post back references to peer-reviewed papers they'd like to highlight on the topics I cover, you are welcome to post them in the comments on my blog. I'm going to stick with journals that provide public access so anyone looking at the blog can see the articles I post. I would recommend you do the same but don't let it hold you back from highlighting a good one if you are itching to share it.

A few (oversimplified) definitions before we get started:

geomicrobiology (and biogeochemistry): science occurring at the interface of the fields of biology, microbiology, geology, and geochemistry.

Journal club: a group of students and/or scientists getting together to discuss papers from the peer-reviewed literature (scientific journals). The point is to learn more about new scientific discoveries, and also to critically evaluate other scientists' work.