So I recently had this idea. Journals publish highlights as supplements to a few of their articles, and journals also display cover art. Highlights are wonderful, but still a time investment to read. Cover art is beautiful (and please keep giving me those projects because I love them) but their information content is somewhat limited. Maybe what's missing is something in between, not to replace either one, but as an additional tool for communication. One aspect of working in a lab that I really miss is journal club, or getting together with lab mates to discuss recent papers. One person would present a paper and everyone would discuss its merits and pitfalls. The format I've adopted here is inspired by that idea, but because I've also challenged myself to keep it to an 8.5 x 11-in print size, the analysis necessarily takes a back seat to the summary.
Shown below is the inaugural journal club. To download a pdf for easier viewing, click here. I won't say much about the paper itself since the idea is for the image to stand alone, but the topic is near and dear to my heart since I worked on Siglecs during my postdoc, and glycobiology in general since graduate school. I won't always be so self-serving, but the topics will primarily come from chemical biology.
My goal is to start out at once a month and then try to increase it to every other week if I can, because another one of the challenges is to choose brand new papers and get these illustrations out quickly. But let's say for starters I'll post them on the last Friday of each month. That sounds like a perfectly procrastinatory schedule that should suit me just fine. Let's just hope this doesn't end up like the time I tried to start doing pilates, or the time I tried to start learning Mandarin, or the time I tried to.....
