Experiences Of A Journal Club Organized By Students: A Proposal For An Evidence-Based Medicine Format

To the editor, Journal clubs are defined as group discussions and criticalevaluations of articles. They can build the link between clinical practice and research data [1]. The three main objectives of a journal club are keeping up with the advances in the literature, learning and applying evidence-based medicine and discussing the clinical relevance of research data [2,3]. There are significant data on postgraduate journal clubs, however, there is sparce information on undergraduate journal clubs. Two papers have focused on undergraduate journal clubs: one used the critique of articles as a method to teach anatomy [4] and the other used dialectical notes to increase student discussion and understanding of the literature of molecular biology [5]. McDonough described undergradute journal clubs as “an excellent way to introduce students to primary literature, to develop their abilities in critical thinking and to practice interpreting experimental data” [5]. Since most of the published data were about postgraduate journal clubs, deriving a format for an undergraduate journal club poses a difficulty. A Student Scientific Research Club (SSRC) was founded in 2011, and has been an active journal club for 4 years at Marmara Medical School. After having four years of experience, in 2015, SSRC decided to have a meeting to discuss its own strong and weak points. A total of 24 people participated in the meeting.