Critical Appraisals at Play: Elevating EM Journal Clubs With Team-Based Competition

During the academic year of 2025-2026, the 36 Emergency Medicine residents of a community medicine affiliate of a tertiary medical center will be compete against each other during the journal club didactic. Three residents will be assigned each month, one from each year, to select a journal article matching the curricular content block of that month. Residents will submit their selected article after faculty approval.

Residents will submit their critiques of the journal articles prior to the scheduled journal club via a dedicated residency website. They will focus on potential methodological flaws of the article. This is congruent to how journal club didactics were focused in the past in the institution, so second and third years will have had exposure to this approach.

During journal club, besides having the resident that selected the article briefly present it, resident critiques will be discussed. A single point will be awarded to each resident for each critique they have submitted. For critiques of significant merit, as determined by the faculty, the journal club facilitator will invite the submitting resident to discuss their critique, and will be awarded 2 points. To discourage artificial intelligence (AI) use without learning, critiques will be selected at faculty discretion to be orally explained during journal club to the satisfaction of the faculty. The faculty have determined that if residents utilize AI as a tool to enhance their learning (instead of simply enumerating critiques blindly on a document), this is in service towards the goal of journal club, and should be encouraged.

As a reward, residents that have the highest running score will receive $100 Amazon gift cards, tiered by 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year academic status.

Attitudes towards the importance of critical assessment of scientific literature, self assessments of fluency in scientific literature appraisal, and the effectiveness of journal club, will be conducted via anonymous survey on RedCap at the beginning and end of the academic year. The survey utilized will be the modified version of a previously validated survey used by Haspel2. Additionally, residents will be assigned Journal Club based quizzes from Rosh Review13, a platform tailored for resident education, at the beginning and end of the year. Rosh Review provides comparative benchmarks that can be used to assess resident performance.