Forum:A silly question about journal clubs

Question

[flogin]

Hey guys, sorry if this is not a properly computational problem, but I'm wondering about journal clubs in bioinformatics.

It's common that many groups of researchers have journal clubs, a kind of meeting that the group discusses any paper or step of the group analysis.

But I'm wondering if some group had created a kind of challenge in these meetings, such as a study that evolve all participants of journal club to solve some biological problem with bioinformatics.

Anyone here participates in an experience like that, or can indicate some online article with something this?

Best,

[Joe]

We've had several "hackathons" at my uni/in the microbial bioinformatics community. It sounds like that's what you're describing?

[flogin]

Yeap, It's in that line, can you put here any article or tool that was developed by your community? during these hackathons*

[Joe]

I can't point you to a single concrete tool that's arisen from one. It tends to be more of a free-form prototyping and discussion forum that just so happens to be built around coding.

That's probably a long way of saying they aren't very good for single tool development, unless everyone has a very clear idea of the challenge beforehand. Unless someone else has some successful counter examples!

Answer 1

[venu]

This is a good idea but IMO it will be too much for a journal club and more appropriate for a workshop.

I once participated in such a programme, where I was teamed up with a group of biologists and tried to come up with a rough project idea where everyones expertise is involved.

One takeaway is, as a bioinformatician, in most cases you can easily identify where and what type of data is needed or if such large-scale data is required yet all for the problem at hand (if you have a bit of biology background). However, from a biologist point of view, most (if not all) were like 'this is the project and we want to do sequencing' & rest is left for bioinformatician.

such as a study that evolve all participants of journal club to solve some biological problem with bioinformatics

Unless it is related to method development, I hardly think there is an end point/solution to the biological problem from purely bioinformatics side.

Interesting to see others opinions.

[flogin]

It's a good point, our group have a team that works in the wet lab, so we have some datasets that came from the wet lab and professionals to test our computational hypothesis with traditional experiments.