A few months ago, I asked how we might reconsider Ph.D. education in light of digital media, social media, and the changing landscape of scholarly publishing.

No matter what your Ph.D. aspirations are, all Ph.D.s are sort-of about publishing and dissemination of research and also reading research, and these activities are being transformed by digital media. I received a many helpful suggestions, and as a result I’d like to offer you a guided tour of my favorites.

I hope this list could be useful as a voyage of exploration for anyone who wants to get a Ph.D. in the social sciences or humanities, broadly defined. It’s also suitable for a professionalization seminar for first-year doctoral students (that’s what I did with it).

The point of this list is not that getting a Ph.D. is totally different now–you’ll notice many of the readings are not new. However, in this list I’ve juxtaposed older advice with much more recent reflection on the state of the academy. Old Ms. Mentor columns are listed near manifestos about the digital humanities, reflections on new scholarly publishing models, cat memes, and Web portals like PhDisabled.

Finally, note also that the point of this list is not where to get a Ph.D. about social media.  It’s: how to get a Ph.D. in any topic within the contemporary context of digital media. That is: your more senior professors probably didn’t exchange information on job wikis, struggle with Homeland Security restrictions, and haven’t installed Typinator, so they’re less likely to give you advice about these things.

Preliminaries:

Essential Software and Online Resources:

• Alerting services:
  • Journal Table of Contents (ToC) alerting services (e.g., JournalTOCs or a publisher-provided service) for a few key journals in your field
  • News summary services (Google Alerts) if your research area includes developments that are likely to be reported on in the mainstream press.
  • If your research area has prominent researchers (or research organizations) with blogs, go click the “Subscribe by E-Mail” button on the blog (or use a service like FeedBurner or Blogtrottr). Some research communities might use a shared Facebook page (or some other platform) for this purpose.
  • Subscribe to e-mail lists that are important in your field. That might include discussion lists, but also announcement lists from entities ranging from your local institution to an international scholarly association. Don’t forget more general professional development lists for all PhD students (and faculty) in any field, like Tomorrow’s Professor
• Basic scholarly reference sources:
  • Article Indices (yes, okay, Google Scholar, but also know your domain-specific article indices from commercial database providers like EBSCO or from your scholarly association — see your local academic reference librarian)
  • Web of Science Citation Indices (e.g,. the SSCI) — you don’t just need to find references, you also need to be able to perform a reverse-citation lookup to see who is citing a reference you are interested in; this lets you trace ideas and findings through the research literature
  • Scholarly encyclopedias relevant to your field (here’s one for my field)
  • Book review repositories — if your research depends on books, you should know how and where your field publishes book reviews (for older, famous books JSTOR advanced search with “reviews” checked works well)
• Desktop/personal software:
  • Bibliographic software (EndNote, Bookends, Zotero, Mendeley)
  • Text expansion software (Typinator, TypeIt4Me, or Texter) will save you millions of keystrokes

Essential books:

1. Buy the official style guide for your discipline or sub-discipline. In the humanities and social sciences, probably something like the Publication Manual of the APA, Turabian Style/Chicago Manual of Style, or the MLA Style Manual. Or buy all of them (COMIC: When You Spend Too Long Reading a Style Manual). Although it is not technically a style manual, many academics also find the AP Stylebook helpful because of the treatment of common wording and grammar problems.
2. William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White. (2000). The Elements of Style. New York: Longman. (Any edition is fine except for the 1920 or 2011+ “Original Edition” that does not include E. B. White. It must have E. B. White.)

The Key 14 Topics:

A Weekly Reading List

“How should I do doctoral research?” is a question where there is no single answer that will apply to everyone. This is a list of 14 weeks of comics, blog posts, papers, contracts, and Web sites that are often quite short, first-person accounts by people advocating a particular position or relating a personal experience. Some are polemical, sarcastic, and intentionally provocative. Some readings obviously disagree with other readings. The list is offered in the hope of generating some knowledge as well as some intellectual frisson, and not because I agree with every particular claim.  I’ve added links when things are available on the Web.

1. What are We Doing Here? (Norms of the Academy)
   • COMIC: The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
   • READING: Turner, Stephen. “Scientific Norms/Counternorms.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ritzer, George (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Blackwell Reference Online.
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Weber, M., (1946 [1921]). Science as a Vocation. In: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. (pp. 129–56)
2. The Advisor/Advisee Relationship
   • COMIC: Just Call me “Dr.”
   • READING: Mutual Expectations Regarding Research Advising. (.docx) In: B. M. Shore, The Graduate Advisor Handbook: A Student-Centered Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Appendix 2)
   • READING: The Professor is In (blog): Top 5 Traits of the Worst Advisors
   • ACTIVITY: The Mentee Expectations Worksheet. From: Rackham Graduate School, (2015). How to Get the Mentoring You Want: A Guide for Graduate Students. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. (p. 36)
   • OPTIONAL, IF NEEDED: The Professor is In (blog): How to Fire a Professor (from your committee), How to Write an E-Mail (to a potential research advisor)
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Read more from How to Get the Mentoring You Want and The Graduate Advisor Handbook (above).
3. Professionalization
   • COMIC: When I’m asked to explain using “Less Jargon.”
   • READING: Academic Language (PDF file #1) and: Building a Professional Identity, Socializing at Conferences, Publication and Credit, Recognizing Difference (PDF file #2) From: Agre, Phil. (2005). Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for Ph.D. Students. Los Angeles: UCLA.
   • READING: The Secretaries Hate Me. (Yes, I’m recommending just the one Q & the one A.) In: Toth, Emily. (2009). Ms. Mentor’s New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Read satirical novels about academia. Recommended: Straight Man, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Moo, Bellwether.
4. Impostor Syndrome
   • COMIC: I still have no idea…
   • READING: Risk. In: Becker, Howard S. & Richards, Pamela. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (excerpt — just the letter in Ch. 6: Risk, pp. 111-120) [Note: Two former students independently told me this letter was one of the most valuable readings they were assigned in their entire Ph.D. career. –Ed.]
5. Selecting a Research Topic
   • COMIC: The statement of purpose
   • READING: So What? Who Cares? In: Graff, Gerald & Birkenstein, Cathy. (2009). They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. (2nd ed.) New York: W. W. Norton & Company.  (ch. 7)
   • READING: Networking and Your Dissertation In: Agre, Phil. (2005). Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for Ph.D. Students. Los Angeles: UCLA.
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: The Thesis Topic, Finding It. In: Peters, Robert L. (20). Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. (rev. ed.) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (ch. 16)
6. Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity, and Specialization
   • COMIC: Interdisciplinary
   • READING: On Interdisciplinarity From: Sterne, Jonathan. Super Bon (blog). (note the question: “Is Interdisciplinarity the opposite of ‘bad’?”)
   • READING: Sandvig, C. (2009). How Technical is Technology Research? In: E. Hargittai (ed.), Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have, pp. 141-163. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Snow, Charles Percy (2001) [1959]. The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press.
7. Literature Reviews
   • COMIC: When You Find a New and Interesting Theorist
   • READING: Terrorized by the Literature. In: Becker, Howard S. & Richards, Pamela. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Ch. 9)
   • READING: Edwards, Paul N. (2015). How to Read a Book. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. (Note: This isn’t the Adler & Van Doren book of the same title.)
   • READING: The Difference Between Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources. In: Booth, Wayne C., Colomb, Gregory G., & Williams, Joseph M. (2008). The Craft of Research. (3rd ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (pp. 68-70)
8. Tone and Voice
   • COMIC: Deciphering Academese
   • READING: Persona and Authority, On “Classier” Writing, “Finished” Products, and Removing “Bullshit” Qualifications. In: Becker, Howard S. & Richards, Pamela. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (various excerpts.)
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Peruse: Swales, John M. (2004). Research Genres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Writing and Rewriting
   • COMIC: “Final.doc”, Academic Writing is Argumentative (sorry this comic is paywalled, can’t find link.)
   • READING: Addicted to Rewriting In: Becker, Howard S. & Richards, Pamela. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (pp. 91-94)
   • READING: Making Prose Speak. In: Germano, William.  From Dissertation to Book. (2nd ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (ch. 8, excerpts)
   • FOR MORE DEPTH: Re-read Strunk and White (above).
10. Evidence
    • COMIC: Evidence
    • READING: Which Article Should You Write? Bem, Daryl J. (2002). Writing the Empirical Journal Article. In: Darley, J. M., Zanna, M. P., & Roediger III, H. L. (eds). The Compleat Academic: A Career Guide. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. (excerpt.)
    • READING: Logic In: Becker, Howard S. (1998). Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (excerpt — pp. 151-158)
    • READING: Making Claims and Assembling Reasons and Evidence In: Booth, Wayne C., Colomb, Gregory G., & Williams, Joseph M. (2008). The Craft of Research. (3rd ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (ch. 8-9 excerpts)
11. Difference
    • COMIC: Visas
    • READING: Who’s Classier? From the Ms. Mentor advice column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
    • READING: Adjusting to American Universities. From the Tomorrow’s Professor listserv.
    • READING: Minority Faculty in [Mainstream White] Academia and Women in Academia In: DeNeef, A. Leigh & Goodwin, Craufurd D. (2007). The Academic’s Handbook. (3rd ed.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (ch. 5-6 excerpts)
    • RESOURCE: See also PhDisabled.
12. Presentations
    • COMICS: Your Conference Presentation, When the Panel You Put Together Goes Well
    • READING: Edwards, P. N. (2015). How to Give an Academic Talk. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan.
    • READING: Bulldozed by a Moderator. From the Ms. Mentor advice column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
13. Publication and Peer Review
    • COMICS: When You Get Published, Your Manuscript on Peer Review
    • READING: Sterne, J. (2014, February). How to Peer Review Something You Hate. Newsletter of the International Communication Association. Washington, DC: ICA.
    • READING: The University of Cambridge HPS extremely short guide explaining How to Publish an Article (excerpts)
    • READING: Lagoze, Carl, Edwards, Paul, Sandvig, Christian, & Plantin, Jean-Christophe. (2015). Should I Stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing. International Journal of Communication 9.
14. The Future
    • COMIC: The Job Market
    • READING: Realities on the Ground, Beware the Route of Nostalgia, The New Media, and A Time of Opportunity In: Smith, S. (2015). Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Thanks to all who contributed.  More suggestions? Please comment!