Research & Journal Club
COMS7050A — MSc Coursework Journal Club
This strand replaces the Honours applied project and accounts for 30% of the course. It includes various activities: reproducing and defending a paper, presenting a paper, critiquing someone else’s work, writing and arguing a referee report, and completing a timed reading exercise.
Many of these tasks are performed live and in person. The core skill involved in all these activities is reading a paper properly — a skill distinct from just reading a paper.
These pages describe how each activity works and how it is marked. The schedule carries this year’s dates: when the strand starts, when papers are confirmed, which sessions the presentations fall in, and when the write-up and vivas are due.
What the 30% is made up of
| Component | Weight | |
|---|---|---|
| Journal Club | Presentation of your paper, in the role of one of its authors | 5% |
| Reviewer 2 — designated discussant on somebody else’s paper | 4% | |
| Referee report on a fresh arXiv preprint, defended orally | 4% | |
| PaperBlitz — an unseen paper, read against the clock | 5% | |
| Research | Reproduction: code, results, and the what-didn’t-reproduce write-up | 7% |
| Reproduction viva | 5% |
Where each piece is written up
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Reading a paper | The three-pass protocol the rest of the strand assumes, and the PaperBlitz drill |
| Paper presentations and reviews | A talk you give in the role of an author, the Reviewer 2 role opposite it, and how each is marked |
| The referee report | A formal review of a paper nobody has reviewed yet, and defending it |
| Reproduction | Choosing a paper, reproducing one claim from it, the write-up and a viva. |
The rubric
We will generally assess the following four criteria across the different activities.
| Criterion | What it means |
|---|---|
| Comprehension | You have understood what the paper actually claims, as distinct from what its abstract advertises. |
| Evidence | Every judgement you offer points at something: a figure, a table cell, a line of your own output. |
| Honesty | Limitations, failures and uncertainty are stated rather than smoothed over. This is the criterion the reproduction strand exists to test. |
| Delivery | You can hold a technical conversation about it in real time, without notes you did not write. |
AI tools
The course policy in the outline applies, with one addition: every assessed piece in this strand is defended verbally, and the defence counts as the grade.
A summary you cannot speak to is worth nothing, regardless of how it was produced.