WINS LAB JOURNAL CLUB

To establish the research culture in WINS lab, to foster a sense of integration, to share ideas, to practice scientific communication, critical thinking and team-based problem-solving skills, and to disseminate information, we plan to start a “paper discussion” session named as “WINS Lab Journal Club”. This is going to be a volunteer activity. Participation after commitment is mandatory no matter how junior or senior you are. Your commitment will be polled at the beginning of each semester with a doodle poll. Note that this is a separate activity from the weekly group seminars where we discuss our own research. Any topic related to the scope of WINS lab is included in this activity.


House rules:
1.	English is the language of this activity.
2.	Make sure everyone understands what you are talking about.
3.	Ask if you do not understand something.
4.	There are no supervisors in this activity, we are all peers and work in a collaborative fashion.
5.	…. whatever else you would propose in the first meeting.

Initial meeting at each semester:
1.	Everybody will nominate some journal papers published in highly credible journals to be discussed in sessions.
2.	As a team, we will select the papers and assign them to individuals.
3.	We will organize the periodic timetable. 
4.	Update the house rule list.

Weekly meetings throughout the semester for 13 weeks:
1.	Everybody will read “the scheduled paper” before coming to the meeting.
2.	The assignee will present the paper within (at max) 10 minutes. No ppts or beamers are required.
3.	We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses in a round-robin fashion. Everyone will have 1 minute in the initial round. 
4.	In the second round, we will follow discuss the paper in free format. We will try to come up with new ideas as to 
a.	how to improve the paper
b.	how to recover from the weaknesses
c.	how to enhance the methodology and so forth.
5.	The assignee will wrap up the discussions and prepare a short summary (at most 1 A4 paper) about the strengths/weaknesses and any open challeges; then upload on the gitlab.

Some questions that may help you while discussing the papers:
1. What is the purpose of the article? Is it reporting an empirical study, a new theory, or is it reviewing previously published theory and research on a certain topic? 
2. What is the topic of the article?  What specifically is the article is addressing? Is it answering a specific question, trying to explain certain observations, presenting a model of some process, exploring the relationship between two or more variables, or something else? Look to the title and abstract for guidance. What variables are mentioned? 
3. Why is this an interesting or worthwhile topic/phenomenon to research? Why would this article interest researchers in the field (the journal editors would not have accepted the article for publication unless it met this role in some way)? 
4. What is already known about this topic/phenomenon?
5. Where are the gaps in contemporary knowledge or understanding of this topic/phenomenon? 
6. How does the research being reported fill gaps in our knowledge/ or understanding of this topic/phenomenon? What niche does this work fill? 
7. What research techniques are used by the author(s)? What was actually done in the research as well as a clue into the thinking of the researcher.
8. How do the methods employed compare with the methods used in other investigations of the same topic/phenomenon? 
9. How do the results relate to the predictions/hypotheses set out in the introduction (i.e., are they supported or not)? 
10. Are the results reported and analyzed in an unbiased manner? 
11. Have the appropriate interpretations of the results been made?
12. Are there ways of interpreting the results that haven't been considered? 
13. Has the researcher presented an unbiased evaluation of the study/method employed? 
14. Has the researcher justified in making any theoretical claims that are made on the basis of the study's findings? Were the hypotheses supported or rejected? 
15. What are the implications of those findings (what do they tell us about theory, research, or real life concerns)? 
16. What suggestions are being made about future research into this topic/phenomenon or what does the researcher consider to be 'the way forward'?