Finding papers for journal clubs

 

Are you interested in getting involved in a journal club? The library’s Knowledge and Evidence Specialists are happy to provide advice and support for journal club set-up or participation and growth. Here we’ve compiled some handy tips for finding and selecting papers to discuss in a journal club.

 

Aims of a journal club

There are many purposes to running a journal club, including:

• To learn how to critically appraise literature
• To improve participants’ understanding of research methodology and evidence-based practice
• To keep up to date with current literature
• To maintain constant involvement in research
• To enhance communication and debating skills through presentations and discussions
• To network with other staff

Initial thoughts for selecting a paper

• Look for original research (e.g. RCTs, cohort studies etc.) or systematic reviews and meta-analyses, avoiding opinion pieces or general literature reviews (without robust search methodology). It’s also good to vary study designs from session to session.
• Think about how recently the article has been published and how important it is for the article to be up-to-date for the topic/field.
• Select articles from reputable journals (use the Think.Check.Submit. website’s advice to avoid predatory/fake/deceptive journals).
• Think about what the current issues are for your group’s area(s) of practice or learning. What might be of interest and relevance to them?
• Be aware of the length of the article and how much time participants need for pre-reading before the session.

Browsing

If you don’t have a specific idea of a topic or question, you could browse certain journals or platforms to find an article of interest. Potential resources could be:

• BrowZine: a website and mobile app that allows you to browse e-journals from different publishers in one simple interface on any device. You can browse by specialty and find links to the full articles.
• BMJ Best Practice or DynaMed: to find further reading on topics of interest, you could search for a particular condition/treatment on these point-of-care tools. Look in the references section for hyperlinks to original research  – these may be potential papers for appraisal.
• The NHS Knowledge & Library Hub is suitable for quick keyword searches.

You will need an Open Athens account to access BMJ Best Practice, DynaMed and the full text of articles that we subscribe to. You can register for an account at https://openathens.nice.org.uk/

If you find an article which you would like to use but can’t access through Open Athens, please email the library.

Structured searching

If you are aware of a gap in your team’s knowledge or have a clinical question in mind, you can structure a search strategy to retrieve results in databases.

One way of framing a clinical question in order to search for a paper is PICO: Patient/Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome(s). Not all of these elements have to be present, for example, you might not want to specify a comparison.

Once you have identified the key concepts in your question, you can pull out the key terms, as well as the synonyms and variant forms of these words – think spelling (US and UK English), plural v. singular, abbreviations, etc.

E.g. for the term ‘training’ you could include education, learning, instruction, CPD, workshop etc.

The asterisk * can be used in many databases to search for the root of the word you have typed in and retrieve any alternate endings, e.g. train* for either train, training, trained, trainer, trainee etc.

(However, be aware that truncation can sometimes make your search too broad.)

Once you have your terms, combine them together with OR or AND. E.g. (anxiety OR generali#ed anxiety disorder OR GAD) AND (Cognitive Behavio?ral Therapy OR CBT) AND (older adult* OR older person* OR older people OR elderly)

Structured searches can be carried out in databases such as Medline, Embase, Emcare and PsycInfo on the Ovid platform. You will need an Open Athens account to access the Ovid databases.

If you would like training on how to search for articles, use databases or critically appraise the articles you find, please email the Knowledge and Evidence Specialists: mtw-tr.evidence.specialists @nhs.net.