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Guidelines to organizing a PhD journal club

The guidelines are based on the founding of a journal club at Terrestrial Ecology Section and the
text below includes issues we came across in this process. There are no regulations for structuring a
journal club and this document should only be considered an inspiration.
1. Organization of the journal club
To ensure a high consistency in the journal club, the main organizing group should be PhD
students. This also makes sense if the PhDs are receiving ECTS for their participation. Master
students, bachelor students, post docs and VIPs could be welcomed to participate to have a larger
group and a wider perspective. But of course, it goes for any participant that you must read the
papers to attend. If master students join and attend the journal club often, they should also assign for
paper presentations. The same goes for post docs and VIPs.
2. Meeting schedule
The frequency of the journal club should be decided based on the number of people who wish to
attend and how many papers that will be discussed at each meeting. An example could be every
second week for 1.5 hours from mid-September to mid-June.
The precise dates can be decided for a semester at a time and thus a room can be booked in advance
for all meetings. You may want to make a habit of announcing the meeting time and papers to be
discussed a week in advance, e.g. on the intranet.
3. Time frame for journal club
Two presenters for every journal club meeting, each presenting a paper. The presenters should make
a few slides with the most important statements and/or figures from the paper. Each paper will get
30-40 min for presentation and discussion, so keep the presentations short (max 5 min.)!
Suggestion for structure: 2 x 40 min presentation and discussion divide by a 10 min break. If
possible, the presenter can prepare a few questions to the paper to start the discussion.
Papers should be mailed to all participants no later than one week before they are presented.
4. Topic
The topic could be open and any scientific paper presented, as long as there would be a reason for
it. However, more narrow guidelines for paper choices could be relevant, depending on the setting
of the journal club. You may want to keep a list of papers that have been presented during the
semester, and you could also consider taking minutes of the key points in the discussions.
5. ECTS points
As a general rule from the PhD school 1 ECTS = 28 hours of work. If each journal is 1.5 hours plus
preparation, participation in the journal club every second week will give 2 ECTS per semester. To
get a diploma as a PhD 2-3 presentations are mandatory per semester. To get a diploma for 2 ECTS
you should attend more than 80 % of the journal clubs that semester. If present at more than 40 %
of the meetings you will get 1 ECTS provided that you have done your presentations.
Up to 7.5 ECTS can be approved for journal clubs according to the course regulations for PhD
students. Remember to have a participation list so presence/absence and number of presentations
can be documented.
To receive the ECTS credit points, PhDs need to get a diploma. A template for the diploma can be
found on the PhD Schools website. If in any doubt regarding getting the credits, contact the PhD
school: PhD@science.ku.dk

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6. Personal responsibility
Once the presenters schedule is made, and you are somehow unable to present a paper at a
given meeting, it is your responsibility to arrange swapping date with someone else.
If you are not attending the journal club on certain dates, let the rest of the group know as
soon as possible.
Everybody should contribute to the discussions also when they are not presenting.