4. Journal Clubs

All six (obligatory) semesters of the PhD curriculum will be accompanied by regular Journal Clubs amounting to a total of 12 semester hours. Journal clubs have the aim to study, in a supervised form but otherwise proactively organized by the PhD-students, the current literature within the scientific field relevant to the research topics of the DK-MCCA. The focus will be on the one hand on recent publications in high-impact journals. A new feature of the MCCA journal club series will be that every third paper presented shall be a ‘classic paper’, something like a ‘pillar of allergy-research’ in order to bring literature to the attention of young scientists, which had a major influence on our today’s knowledge of IgE-associated allergies and/or the immune system and the involved target organs in more general. Pillars of allergy-research papers will be nominated by Faculty Members, Guest Scientist and ISAB members and should be older than 10-15 years. The papers selected for this special feature should have had a great impact on the way we have thought about and have interpreted certain problems before their publication. Consequently, most of the selected papers will have a very high citation frequency. MCCA journal clubs will be composed of two categories, those which are held within the research group or institution and those to which all MCCA students come together and meet their intramural Faculty members as discussants. Apart from getting into contact with the contemporary literature and ‘pillars of allergy-research papers’, this will be an additional occasion for the PhD students to become acquainted with MCCA Faculty members and their scientific thoughts and views on the published results. MCCA journal clubs will take place biweekly and will rotate between the different research institutions of the DK-MCCA (i.e., those situated in Vienna, Krems, Tulln and St. Pölten). After every other Journal Club (monthly) a ‘Special Journal Club’ will be offered to permit socializing activities in a scientific environment.