In my lab, we have to give presentations on other people’s papers for journal club. My understanding is that the purpose of journal club is to (a) make sure that our research group is getting adequately exposed to ideas from other research groups and (b) to give the presenter some practice communicating scientific results in between their own major results (which can sometimes be years apart).

For my most recent journal club presentation, I had the pleasure of having to prepare my presentation extremely quickly due to a busy week filled with other responsibilities. Thankfully, this is my third time leading journal club, so I’ve started to develop a process. And I even received (what seemed to be sincere) positive feedback from the other lab members and my PI after the presentation.

So I thought it might be helpful to expand on what my process was for putting this presentation together so quickly, both as a practical guide and as insight into how to approach other people’s work in general. Here’s the trick: you’ve adequately explained a presentation when the audience can understand and interpret every figure. This is something that I didn’t appreciate before I became a graduate student and I had to read papers in-depth: for non-theoretical papers (so experimental and computational papers), the figures are the paper. Text is mainly for background information or to provide more context for the results displayed in the figure.

This is useful under a time crunch because instead of reading the paper passively, you read actively with a task in mind (e.g. How do I make sense of subfigure B in Figure 3?)

If you want, you can even use this tip as the basis for your whole presentation: each slide is just a figure from the paper. You go over the various subplots in detail, taking the occasional detour to the whiteboard in order to sketch out a particular important proof or to work through an example.

Again, this works well for experimental and computational papers, especially in areas where you have mild expertise. I haven’t yet figured out if there is a similar trick for presenting math papers.