Join the F1000Journal Club - New Tools for Discussing and Organizing Research Articles

Online, January 16, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Scientists and clinicians can spend hours each month critically evaluating published research as part of their training and teaching, but valuable discussions about what makes a good or bad paper are often lost forever. F1000Journal Clubs (http://f1000.com/prime/journalclubs), a new feature of F1000Prime that launches today, makes these discussions - journal club meetings - more online, more open and efficient, and helps scientists get recognition for more of their contributions to science.

F1000Journal Clubs, which is available to all subscribers to Faculty of 1000's F1000Prime, is dedicated to organizing, archiving and sharing the conclusions of journal club meetings. It can extract images and create presentations automatically from article PDFs, and the system can personally recommend relevant articles to its users based on their own research interests.

F1000Journal Clubs is integrated with F1000Prime's continuously updated database of top articles in biology and medicine, enabling users of F1000Journal Clubs to access the opinions of 6,000 leading scientists, including nine Nobel Prize winners, to help choose articles for their journal club meetings.

Omer Gazit, Director of Research & Development at F1000, said: "Article recommendations published in F1000Prime often come from journal club meetings and we've built F1000Journal Clubs to provide a better, more complete and personalized literature service to researchers. F1000Prime is evolving into a broad set of tools for storing, sharing and discussing research articles in public and private groups. I'm grateful to members of the F1000 community who have helped test and refine the service and with their help we will keep improving it."

Dr Ann Walker, University College London, said: "Several students and members of staff helped with testing of F1000Journal Clubs and we find it to be a powerful resource. The figure extraction tool, which provides a template journal club presentation at the click of a mouse, works well and is very popular. I'm sure it will save us valuable time and be a good resource for teaching literature evaluation."

To enable a large proportion of the scientific community to try out F1000Journal Clubs, F1000Prime remains available for a one month free personal trial subscription. And, if an existing subscriber to F1000Prime invites someone to join an F1000Journal Club who does not subscribe to F1000Prime, the new user will receive three months free access to the service. Anyone with access to F1000Prime through their university library just needs to register with F1000 to use F1000Journal Clubs.

To find out more, please contact Iain Hrynaszkiewicz on +44 (0)20 7079 4888 or email [email protected]