A breakdown of time spent reading my journal club article

  1. Reading the text: This was my first experience reading a scientific letter rather than a full article. The paper was extremely condensed and data-focused, without a separate discussion section. Brief, one-sentence conclusions were added after each block of results, and I spent a lot of time trying to follow each experiment and understand its significance. Reading was a very slow process, as well as trying to understand the figures.
  2. Re-reading the text: My paper was definitely meant for an audience who was very familiar with the field, and jumping into an unfamiliar topic meant it took me at least two reads to understand what they were talking about and how it fit into the larger context.
  3. Falling down a rabbit hole of background topics: Each time I came across an unfamiliar term or technique, I had to do a Google search to move on. I learned about new techniques, data representations, and biological mechanisms. Without knowing the background, it would be a lot harder to understand the significance of the work, and this research took a lot more time than expected.
  4. Flipping back and forth to find figures: I was first drawn to my paper because of its topic, but I felt even more inclined to choose it when I saw the references section started on page four. I didn’t realize there were 14 pages of supplementary figures to follow, and because the main paper was so short, looking at these figures was actually necessary to understand the findings. Keeping the figures up on a computer while reading a paper copy of the article might reduce this distracting back and forth.  
  5. Other: Includes time spent looking up acronyms and committing them to memory, writing notes, highlighting, taking an eye strain break, etc.

Overall, I enjoyed delving into a new topic through this journal club presentation. The paper I read really demonstrated how science builds on itself and how biological processes are interconnected, and it felt good to recognize components of our 20.109 modules in a published paper.

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