Student Resources

At each traditional Journal Club, two trainees deliver PowerPoint presentations and moderate discussions regarding a study relevant to occupational and environmental health and safety published in a scientific journal. Each presentation is 30 minutes and should roughly follow this format: 15 minutes for the main presentation and 15 minutes for group discussion that includes pre-prepared questions from the presenter for the audience as well as questions from the audience for the presenter.

All RMCOEH-funded trainees are required to attend at least 70% of the weekly, “traditional” Journal Clubs throughout the academic year either in person or via Zoom. To receive attendance credit for a missed Journal Club, a trainee may watch a recording of the session and submit a summary report to RMCOEH Creative Manager Bubba Brown (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), who facilitates Journal Club. Recordings can be found on RMCOEH’s YouTube page.

Reports are due by 12 p.m. one week after the Journal Club. For instance, to receive credit for a Journal Club held on Friday — as most are — a trainee must submit the report by noon the following Friday. The report must be at least one page, double spaced, with a type size no larger than 12. 

Trainees must include the following in the reports:

• A summary of both articles. The summaries should be brief but sufficiently demonstrate that the trainee read each article in addition to watching the recording of the Journal Club. 
• A brief summary of each presenter’s opinion of, and insight into, the article they chose. 
• The trainee’s own opinion regarding the studies. Do the data justify the authors’ conclusions? Were there flaws in the study design? How could the research have been conducted differently or better?  

Flash Journal Club is held in small-group settings, with trainees delivering 5-minute PowerPoint presentations on a study relevant to occupational and environmental health and safety published in a scientific journal. Presentations should succinctly detail the article, as well as the presenter's opinions regarding the quality of the research and what the researchers could have done to improve the study. The purpose of flash Journal Club is, in part, to develop trainees' ability to clearly communicate complex information to an audience in a limited amount of time, a critical skill that will serve graduates well in their careers. 

RMCOEH Creative Manager Bubba Brown (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) sends an email to all trainees prior to the start of the academic year that includes a link to the Journal Club schedule. Trainees have a short window in which they can choose the dates they'd like to present. Once that window closes, RMCOEH-funded trainees who do not sign up will be assigned dates based on seniority, with more senior trainees slotted into earlier dates. Trainees who need to change dates due to unforeseen circumstances must contact Brown as soon as possible and will be asked to work with him to find another trainee willing to swap dates. Trainees are asked to stick to their chosen or assigned dates if at all possible.

Students should present a peer-reviewed article that is relevant to their studies in occupational and environmental health and safety. There are a number of sources available to find an article, including PubMed, ScienceDirect, EBSCOHost, and other scientific databases available through the Marriott Library (logging in is necessary to bypass paywalls for off-campus access).

Advice for choosing a paper:

• Ask a faculty member if you have a topic in mind but not a paper
• Find papers that have been cited by other researchers
• Consider papers relevant to your career goals
• Look for papers that have been published within the last five years or that are seminal (i.e., an earlier article that strongly influenced later developments) or novel in approach, design, or topic
• Select a paper that is key for your research project
• Pick a paper that is challenging to analyze, helping you (and your peers) learn more

The best Journal Club papers hit multiple bullet points. Trainees must send a PDF version of their chosen article to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. at least one month prior to their presentation.

Traditional and clinical Journal Club

Trainees should create presentations 30 minutes in length. Approximately 15 minutes should be devoted to PowerPoint slides, leaving the rest of the time for group discussion. Slides should be simple, with images and concise text. Rather than reading the text word for word, presenters should use the slides as talking points to guide the presentation. Toward the end of the PowerPoint, presenters should provide three to five questions for the audience to guide the group discussion.

Presentations must include the following elements:

1. Purpose of the study
2. Type of study (cross sectional, prospective cohort, meta-analysis, etc.)
3. Overview of the methods (including study population, data collection, analysis, article scoring)
4. The main results
5. Strengths of the study
6. Weaknesses of the study
7. Discussion of the results (how might the presenter implement the results into their own work, future research that could emerge from the results)
8. Questions for group discussion (see below)

Flash Journal Club

Trainees should follow the same principles of a successful presentation: preparing simple slides, with images and concise text, and using the slides as talking points rather than reading from them word for word. Given the brief length of the presentation, trainees should be selective about determining which information is essential to adequately inform the audience about the study and their assessment of it. The audience will have an opportunity to ask a question or two following the presentation, but trainees do not need to include a question-and-answer segment in their 5 minutes.   

The questions included in presentations should be open-ended to facilitate group discussion. Below are generic prompts that presenters can use or modify:

1. What is the study adding that is new, innovative, or interesting?
2. How is this study relevant to your field (e.g., industrial hygiene, ergonomics)? How might this study be relevant to other fields?
3. What are the implications of this study? For clinical or professional practice and/or research? For future studies?
4. What sort of data do the authors have, and what statistical methods did they use to analyze the data? What were the benefits and drawbacks of these methods?
5. Do you see any unaddressed biases in the paper (e.g., the “healthy worker” effect in which only healthy and active workers are included, the self-reporting bias in which people may report what they wish they did rather than what they actually did, or selection biases in recruitment like gender, age, race, etc.). What effect(s) might these biases have?
6. Has the study appropriately addressed confounders? If not, what confounders should the authors have considered? What effect might dealing with confounders have on these results?
7. Do the data justify the conclusions? Why or why not?
8. How generalizable are these results? Could these findings be applied to other populations?
9. Is the sample size appropriate for the study? Why or why not?

For all Journal Clubs, presenters must select their article and send a PDF copy to RMCOEH Creative Manager Bubba Brown (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) a month in advance. Journal Club is open to the public, and this allows RMCOEH to better engage members of the OEHS community who may wish to attend. 

Presenters must email their PowerPoint slides to Bubba no later than the day before their presentation.