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Our lab holds small journal club meetings once a week where one member
leads a discussion on an article of interest. Everyone reads the article,
but only the presenter has any obligation to be very familiar with it.
When I am preparing to present an article, I like to underline the points
of discussion in colour-coded felt-tip pen and highlighter.
The procedure is way too intensive and time consuming for articles that
just need to be skimmed, but I've found it very helpful when I need to
know an article inside and out.
1) I colour code premises, methods, results, people, terms, and
definitions*. This allows me to quickly locate the answers to things that
can slow down discussion like misunderstandings on the finer points of the
methods, clarify terms/acronyms, etc.
2) Colourful felt tip pens are something I find motivating. It's fun to
do, and it's fun to look at.
3) It makes the amount of work you've done obvious to your supervisor ;).
Anyone can underline anything that looks like a declarative statement in
pencil. When it's in a lot of colours, it's clear you've done your
homework.
4) Reading looking for these sorts of information makes me approach an
article in an appropriately analytical frame of mind. Unfortunately, I
can't read science as easily as a novel.
5) Tracking people (authors, big citations) makes it possible to build an
understanding of which people work together championing which sorts of
ideas, and reminds me to look at author webpages to look for other papers
I might find relevant.
6) I'm trying to work out how to go through all my term and definition
highlighting to build a personal glossary of my area of study, and this
should also help me to detect when people use same terms to indicate
different things or when they use different terms to indicate the same
things (the latter happens a LOT between psychology vision papers and
computer vision papers).**
Granted, there are major headings for results, methods, conclusions in
most articles, but often some of these things are phrased most succinctly
in the abstract or results in the discussion, etc.. Plus, when you're
flipping through several pages (as long as you aren't colour blind),
looking for pink pen is a lot quicker than skimming looking for the
"methods" heading.
I will let you know of my other brilliant processes as they develop ;).
Take care, Liz
* Order of importance:
1) terms
2) premises
3) results
4) methods
5) people
6) definitions
... the lower priority elements get dropped depending on how quickly I
want to process the article.
** A psychological benefit of doing this is seeing yourself highlight
fewer and fewer terms as you become more proficient in an area of study.
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