The ability to critically evaluate scientific literature is crucial for doctoral students at the beginning of their scientific careers.
However, a lack of systematic training can impair students’ future ability to evaluate the work of others in their field.
“Reviewing and analyzing scientific literature is a big part of training graduate students,” says Sarah Klass, a postdoctoral fellow in UC Berkeley’s Keasling Lab and the Joint Bioenergy Institute and lead recipient of a two-year, $499,992 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. “But there is no formal training” on how to do that, Klass continues.
To address this discrepancy, Klass and her partners will use the NSF grant to fund a new curriculum that will introduce science graduate students to the “principles and practices of peer review and science communication, with a strong emphasis on building practical skills.” Peer review involves having scientific papers reviewed by multiple experts to ensure their quality before publication.
The team will spend the first year developing a curriculum. In the second year, UC Berkeley graduate students will put it to the test. The fellow team, which includes Professor Stefano M. Bertozzi of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and a yet-to-be-determined team of UC Berkeley graduate students, will collect data on impact and effectiveness.
The proposed curriculum builds on the success of the journal Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR_ID) has helped make rigorous peer review faster and more efficient, including by training undergraduate students at UC Berkeley. RR_ID is an open access journal that prioritizes rapid and efficient peer review, student education and mentoring, and supports the democratization of academic publishing through partnerships with a dozen academic institutions in low- and middle-income countries that will be established over the next three years. Bertozzi is the journal’s editor-in-chief.
“As part of the UC Berkeley Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, RR_ID The editors have offered a workshop where students can participate in research projects with faculty members for academic credit, focusing on topics of particular interest,” the grant application states. “The goal is to familiarize students with current scientific and academic research, peer review processes, and publication standards, particularly with regard to infectious diseases.”
The new curriculum project will pilot a curriculum for a training program that will initially include UC Berkeley STEM students specializing in a broad range of fields related to infectious disease, data science, public health, engineering, and basic biological and chemical sciences. “By providing students with the necessary tools and insights to critically evaluate scientific literature and review preprints, our goal is to improve students’ research/literature understanding and engagement with their respective STEM fields,” the team said.
“We try to teach PhD students good peer review skills so they can help rapidly disseminate peer-reviewed literature that can have an immediate impact on people’s lives,” says Klass.
“In particular, the intellectual discourse that needs to take place around science is closed and isolated,” says Hildy Fong Baker, executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Global Public Health and executive director of the project. “We are creating an opportunity for people to be part of an ecosystem at the beginning of their careers.”
The course materials produced during the two-year grant period will ultimately be made openly available to everyone to encourage other institutions around the world to adopt and adapt the curriculum.
