Content
Recent (0-3 years old) papers in the area of surface water quality, covering a range of problems, including pharmaka, cyanobacteria, antibiotic resistance … are discussed. The class meets every two weeks to discuss one original research (i.e. not review, vision, etc.) paper.
For every meeting, there will be a leader (or multiple leaders depending on the number of participants) and participants. Everyone will read the paper in advance of the class. Leaders: Lead(s) the discussion. For multi-person groups, the presenters may adopt different roles, like a “devil’s advocate” that is critical of the paper and tries to question the conclusions. Participants: Prepares a few bullets outlining the strengths and weaknesses and a ranking (1-10, 10 is best); sends this to the presenter by 17:00 on the day before the meeting (the presenter will add this to his/her slide presentation); presents (i.e. talks) this information during the meeting.
The paper is provided by the participant(s) or selected from a list of suggested papers provided by the instructor. Participants are encouraged to select papers in the area of their own MS or PhD research/thesis. Discussions include a thorough review and critical discussion of the paper. This may include: (a) review of previous papers/research that set the stage for this paper, (b) comparison to one or more other papers in this area, which may have used different methods or reached different conclusions, (c) additional quantitative calculations based on the results in the paper; (d) a perspective on the importance of the findings to the field of surface water quality, (e) an assessment of the impact of the paper (e.g. article views, Altmetric, citations); (f) potential future research tasks building on the paper; (g) a discussion of the presentation, i.e. quality/effectiveness of figure and clarity of writing (vs. content).
