How to Give a Great Journal Club Presentation

A lot of advanced science education takes place in the more-or-less formal setting of a Journal Club where one member of a group presents a paper from the scientific literature to the whole group. Giving a good presentation is a learned skill; here are some tips on how to do it well.

1. Pick a good paper. (Don’t get all neurotic about this. If you find it interesting and significant, then it will almost certainly benefit your group. If you’re in doubt, ask a colleague or mentor.) Read it. Two or three times. Skimming quickly may be enough to tell you whether or not there is something to it, but getting down to the level of detail that you’ll want to have under control for the actual presentation can easily take more time and effort than you first think it will. Is it clearly written and understandable? If you find it too difficult, or poorly written to get the message, chances are that others will struggle too. You might want to pick a different paper.
2. Ask yourself why the authors did the research.  What did they hope to learn?  The abstract and conclusion of a paper generally express the essence of the work.  Read them carefully even before going over the rest of the paper in depth. It often helps you to figure out the big picture, especially when the authors seem to take it for granted that all readers will see what it is. Authors often start off by saying that some subject, X, “is not well-understood.”  Well, of course it’s not!  That’s why they got a paper out of studying X.  The statement usually just gives you a general idea of what the about and is only rarely the level of information that you want.  
3. Find the hypothesis in the paper; most have one, but a great many papers that are based on hypotheses don’t say so explicitly (BTW, some authors say they’re testing a “model;” occasionally they are referring to an “animal model” such as a mouse, but usually a model that’s being tested is the same as a hypothesis). 
4. The most important thing for your audience is to trace the logical flow of the paper. How do the experiments in the paper test the hypothesis? Is each result truly relevant to the hypothesis: that is, does it support or contradict it, or is it irrelevant to the truth of the hypothesis (this is more common than you might think)? 
5. With practice you can make a smooth and informative narrative out of any average paper.  When transitioning from one figure to the next, avoid the trite and deadly-boring phrase “… and then they wanted to look at…” The authors certainly had a reason for “wanting to look at” whatever they looked at. Tell the audience what it was!  Why did they do what the authors did and why that experiment followed at that point.  What did they learn by doing it? 
6. Be able to go over the important figures, tables or other displayed items in enough detail to make the main point(s) clear.
7. You should understand the methods used by the authors well enough to explain them generally to a group, and say why the authors chose them. You are not expected to become a technical expert in the field represented by the paper, however. Be aware of notable advantages and limitations of the methods in case questions about them arise.
8. Try to anticipate the kinds of questions that may come up, but if you can’t answer one, it is perfectly ok to say, “I don’t know.” We’ve all been there.  Maybe someone else in the group does know, in any case an honest statement of ignorance is preferable than trying to fake it. 
9. You must be scrupulously fair to the authors, but you are not their advocate; your job is to discuss their paper in a critical and insightful way.  After presenting their reasoning and results as the authors would want them to be presented, feel free to point out shortcomings if you disagree with them or think that they have made a mistake in reasoning, execution, etc..  But be a bit cautious:  if you think that the authors made a bone-headed error, try extra hard to understand what they were doing.  It is possible that they did err somehow, but it is possible that you’ve missed something.  Hopefully, your audience will be engaged and following right along and they will raise critical questions as well. It is important to keep in mind that an attack on the paper is not an attack on you!  Your reputation is not on the line here, the authors’ reputations are.  Of course, if you wind up completely trashing the paper, it may appear that you didn’t follow rule number 1.
10. Be aware that you may be the only person in the room who has actually read the paper.  You are the authority on it.  A common mistake is to assume that everyone else already knows full well what you just spent a week learning; after all, they showed up expecting to be enlightened.  There might be one or two experts in the audience, but you should assume that most people aren’t experts. And even experts are rarely offended by hearing a concise review of the basics: they know full well that the audience needs it. So don’t assume too much and do give enough detail. Your main task is to educate your colleagues about a piece of work that you think is interesting and valuable.  
11. Plan to finalize your talk at least a day or so in advance. Practice going through the slides out loud (ideally with a couple of friends), indicating the major points of each one, but do not try to memorize or read your talk! It’s nice to know your transition to the next slide, but if you forget it, don’t panic – just advance the slide and pick up from there. (Some people like to have a card with a few notes on it as a security blanket in case of a public brain freeze.  Ordinarily, having a card handy is enough to guarantee that they won’t need it.)
12. On the day of the talk show up early, get into the room, get your presentation loaded. and flip through the slides in advance.  Every experienced presenter has nightmare stories of last minute computer crashes, software incompatibilities, missing pointers, unfamiliar set-ups. These problems are not fun, and not what you want to have to cope with after you’ve been introduced. If you find a glitch during your run-through, you’ll have time to fix it.