Later on this week, I’ll be doing a Journal Club on Journal Clubs (on Weds 21st at 1500 UK time – register here)! The aim of this Journal Club is to provide a bit of a ‘how-to’ guide on identifying and critically analysing good studies. Clearly, the definition of a “good” study will very much depend on your point of view and your interests. For example, a very well designed and conducted study in one journal may be of far less interest to you than a less well designed and / or conducted study on a more relevant topic. I picked up this BMJ Evidence Based Medicine article on Journal Clubs from 2017, which I’ve suggested as reading material before the Journal Club.
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It’s time for a mini-revolution in scientific publishing: a truly universal manuscript format
There’s a problem with academic publishing. This could be (but isn’t) a post about the lottery of peer review, the scandalous mountain of largely unpaid reviewing and editorial work that journals benefit from, the urgent need to adopt open access, or the interesting dynamics introduced by pre-print servers. Instead, this post is about a big problem with an easy solution: hours and hours of expert scientific time (and with that, grant money) currently being wasted reformatting manuscript for the initial submission to various journals. The solution: create and implement a truly universal manuscript format for the initial submission.
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 