Definition of a Journal Club

A “journal club” is comprised of  individuals, generally involved in medical residency training, the health care professions, or a scientific discipline who meet regularly to review and evaluate articles in the professional literature.

The journal club has been a mainstay in graduate medical education since the 1870s when Sir William Ostler (l.),  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Osler the father of modern medical education, introduced it as a means of sharing scarce print journals among his students and colleagues at McGill University.

Since then, the journal club has continued to serve as an educational vehicle to teach members how to critically appraise the merits and structure of scholarly publications, and more recently, to identify quality evidence-based medical literature.

Rarely has the journal club been a method of training, education, or dissemination of scholarly information in the humanities or Librarianship. 

However, a review of the literature indicates that Journal Clubs are gaining popularity in the humanities and libraries.  The usefulness of a Journal Club as a collective, low cost initiative enabling like minded scholars to read and apply the content of professional journals is catching on across the country, and the world.
http://blogs.ubc.ca/journalclub/
http://www.lib.cua.edu/newsevents/558/