What to expect

We meet bi-weekly at 3PM BST (10AM EDT) to live-stream a discussion about the selected article. You’re invited to chat with us on Twitter using the hashtag #microtwjc or the YouTube chat pane.

We strongly encourage everyone to read the selected article. The better prepared we all are, the better our collective understanding of the scientific findings. To guide your reading (and our later discussion) we suggest thinking about the five questions typically used in the academic setting.

  1. What was known about the subject before this paper was published?
  2. How does the data support the conclusions?
  3. What are the limitations in their experimental design?
  4. What have we learnt after reading the paper?
  5. What future work would be of interest to conduct?
Tweet us other questions as you read

Next meeting’s article

In our next meeting we will be discussing the following journal article:

Set-up for an online journal club

Using Twitter

The internet allows us to connect with a very different audience than a journal club in academia. We want to extend the opportunity to critically explore scientific journal articles to everyone. Science is as much about the collection of data as it is about the interpretation and we believe that ongoing review of the published literature is an important part of the scientific enterprise.

We are using twitter to make some noise on social media and raise the bar of critical science conversation on that platform. We advise using software to help follow the conversation over the hashtag (and to remove those pesky ads). Check out some of these helpful tools!

  • TweetChat: a web-based single hasthag “chat” interface
  • Twitterfall: a web-based interface with many customization options
  • Hootsuite: a freemium product with a “panes” based UX
  • Choqok: a FLOSS linux client

Tuning in...

We suggest you tweet any questions to us as you read through the paper. During the event we will prompt discussion on Twitter and address any questions that may arise. Tangents are inevitable and we encourage participants to get involved and speak to each other! Remember to be respectful and use the hashtag.