Fellow neuroscience graduate students and faculty,
I am a graduate student in the neurosciences and I wondered if I could get
some opinions from both students and faculty about the most productive /
effective way to run journal club type seminars. Particularly, when
students who work in a variety of different areas ranging from primate
behavior to autonomic heart rate control to age-dependent plasticity in the
basal ganglia. The question is, when any subject is chosen, several
participants will be less familiar with the background literature whether it
be because they are newer students or because it is not their area of
expertise.
1. In order to get discussion moving so that many people can
participate, is it acceptable to engage in what (to the experts) may seem
like wild speculation?
2. If a paper has been chosen and the authors are less rigorous about
defining their hypothesis than the standards of faculty present would
usually allow, is it still possible to discuss interpretation of data in a
meaningful way?
3. If the terms used in a paper, which have been well defined in the
literature prior to this paper, begin to be used with definitions which veer
away from the strict operational parameters to which they were once
associated, is it better to discuss/teach the former literature which
these authors seem to discount or to question the previous definitions?
Thank you for your participation. I just wanted to hear what the rest of
the world thought.
Michael Sandstrom
misandst at magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
