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Journal Clubs: How to for Nurses

Tips, tricks, ideas, and resources for starting and managing a journal club for nurses & allied health professionals

Create Your Own Journal Club

Why Participate in Journal Club?
  • Cultivate a culture of inquiry
  • Generate clinical questions
  • Develop critical appraisal skills & promote reflective practice
  • Promote professional development & provide a forum for CEUs
  • Stay up-to-date with current evidence
  • Disseminate new information into practice
  • and more

How To Get a Journal Club Started

  1. Determine the goals of your journal club. What are you trying to foster or to accomplish? The Why's above & the workbook below can help lead you through this process.
  2. What format should you use for your journal club? 
  3. Duration & frequency of the journal club. How often will you meet? For how long each time?
  4. Contact the library for assistance in finding & selecting articles for you journal club. You can also check out Ideas for Articles

 

Journal Club How-To's, Guides, & Workbooks

Critical Appraisal

Diamond or a Dud? How do I know if the article selected for journal club is a good one?

 

Appraise the quality of the article(s) you are considering sharing with your journal club.

Look for :

  1. Clinical relevance
  2. Good science based on article type
  3. Risk of Bias
 
Appraisal Tools & How-To's

The evidence-based practice model used at Inova, the Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence-Based Practice Model, has easy worksheets to guide you through the appraisal process. See Appendix E: Research Evidence Appraisal Tool and Appendix F: Non-Research Evidence Appraisal Tool *

How To Read a Paper -- series of articles published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)

*Links take you to the tools on InovaNet . Email library@inova.org or call 703-776-3357 if you cannot access InovaNet and would like us to send the tools to you. Available only to Inova Team Members, but you can request access from Johns Hopkins here.
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