How to Read an Academic Book

Sometimes, you're so deep into into a term paper or a topic of research that you just have to sit down, grind it out, and read the darn book. Sometimes, you're hunting through the index of different books to find information on one narrow topic. Very, very occasionally, an author's prose is good enough and the subject interesting enough that you want to read the whole book.

This is not for those times.

When you have a massive pile of history reading to get through, especially when you need to understand the major arguments in scholarship on a specific topic quickly, this is the accepted strategy.

0. What do you need to know?

Author, position in historiography (why this book needs to exist), main argument (thesis), major body of sources, methodology, brief outline of how argument is developed, brief notes on your assessment of the work (does it make sense, did the author mishandle the sources, where did it go too far, where didn't it go far enough, etc)

1. Read book reviews.

Try searching Google for [author last name] [title] review. Amazon and Goodreads are not your destination. You want reviews from peer-reviewed academic journals, which will in most cases be accessible through a database like JSTOR, ProQuest, or Cambridge. There are some fantastic free sources of reviews, too: H-net.org and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (for relevant topics) can be really helpful. You might also turn up something good and in-depth from a scholar's blog!

You can also search databases internally, but Google (regular Google) is pretty darn good at universal search in this case.

If you don't have access to academic databases, you might get lucky and get the beginning of the review visible for free via preview on (at least, to my knowledge) Cambridge, Project Muse, and JSTOR.

Not all academic book reviews are good ones, but a good one should give you an idea of the book's thesis, some key arguments within it or points of evidence, maybe a general outline (this is rarer than I'd like), perhaps some remarks on where the book fits in to the overall pattern of scholarship, and maybe an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses as a piece of history. Shockingly, these are exactly the things that you will want to take away from the book.

I like to take notes on the reviews I read.

2. Read the introduction. Take notes.

If you're lucky, the author will use the introduction to tell you the book's argument, how they will develop it (outline of the book), their methodology or analytical framework (deep reading? applied feminist theory?), and discuss their main body of sources. For anthologies, that is, collections of essays by different authors, a good editor will include a brief summary of each essay. That happens less often than it should. Typically (though not always), you will get some good insight into the overall theme of the anthology and that topic's significance to the historical narrative of the time period.

3. Read the conclusion

The conclusion should reiterate the introduction or take the story in a new direction. Especially if the introduction is weak, you might get some good information or quotations that you can use in a literature review paper or something from the conclusion.

4. Write down the table of contents

To help you get a quick impression of the book's argument in 3 months when you're coming back to these notes, you're going to make a quick outline of the central point of each chapter. (If the introduction did the work for you, awesome.) That will let you see, at a glance, the roughest path of the argument's development.

5. Read the first couple and last couple pages of each chapter.

Especially if the book proceeds as a "collection of chapters" rather than a united narrative, you will get a mini-intro and mini-conclusion on the topic in those pages. (Sometimes you'll have to read past an opening anecdote, but then, those are often interesting and worth the read. Don't forget--you like history; that's why you're doing this.)

6. Optional: actually read one of the chapters through

This can be if one catches your eye, seems like it could be pretty helpful, or to get an idea for how the author handles the specific body of sources they use.

7. Bonus! If you have a stack of books on the same topic, read the most recent one first.

If you are very lucky, one of the more recent authors will provide you with a historiography or literature review: that is, a brief summary of game-changing books or articles on the same or a similar topic. If you get really, really lucky, you will get enough of an idea from later books that you can more or less skip or skim even more briefly the earlier ones.

8. Perform some kind of synthesis.

You might try writing a one-page "review" hitting up the key points from #0; you might try explaining the book out loud to your pet or a (bribed) friend. Just do something to bring the scattered bits together in your mind, even if briefly.

Super extra special advice for graduate students

If your class has been assigned a whopload of reading, which it has, strategize with each other over who skips which reading. Make sure that at least two people have covered each text, so there can be conversation. Don't. Ever. All. Abandon. The. Same. Book. It will go...poorly.

Yo, /u/k_hopz, I messaged you about this last week, but I think it got missed. Sorry if I step on your toes!

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Separating chaff and wheat: how to evaluate secondary sources.

Secondary sources are extremely useful while doing research, because they are intended to put primary source documents into proper context for the reader. Primary source documents are limited by the fact that you might not be aware of the larger context that they were written in; relying on primary sources alone is faulty for this reason. Secondary source documents are intended to analyze and to interpret these primary sources to forward arguments and to better understand how these primary sources fit in the larger picture.

That being said, not all secondary sources are created equal. Some secondary source literature is better than others. So how does one determine this?

Before reading the text:

• Who is the publisher? Check the publishing house or the journal in which it's been published in. If it's a university press like Oxford University Press, it's more likely to be not bullshit, compared to something that's being published by, say, Samisdat Publishers. (Don't use anything published by them, by the way, it's a publishing house for neo-Nazi pamphlets.) Similarly, if the journal is well known in the field, it's more likely to be not bullshit.

  Mind, sometimes university presses and journals publish bullshit. It happens. Nevertheless, it's a decent starting point to separate chaff from wheat. If you're not sure if a publishing house or a journal is reputable, ask your teacher/professor.

• Is the author someone who's trained in the field? Check the author's credentials. If they're trained in the field, it's less likely to be bullshit.

  Note that this is not bulletproof, and that accredited academics can publish bullshit while outsiders can publish amazing books. Again, this is just a starting point.

• When did this secondary source come out? Check its copyright date. If the book you're looking at is from 1907, it's probably too old. While it'll be good for a historiography paper discussion methodology, it might not be very useful when it comes to your paper. Even worse, if a book is too old, it might be pushing bad history that has been debunked by more recent research. Note that overturn rates differ between fields. New research comes out at different rates. If you're not sure if a source might be too outdated for your use, please feel free to ask your teacher/professor.

• If you can, check for book reviews. I like checking JSTOR for books I'm looking into and seeing what other historians have thought of that book or piece of research. If the reviews are generally positive, it's probably okay.

• I find a lot of secondary source literature through recommendations from others, and it's likely that you will as well. If this is a recommendation from somewhere else, who is recommending it? Why? If you're seeing a recommendation for this book on a website like the Institute for Historical Review, don't walk, run.

Reading the text:

• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If a claim seems extraordinary, check their sources. If you're reading a book that claims that aliens built the pyramids in South America, you should be checking their source material. If you're reading a book that claims that the Chinese discovered the Americas in 1421, check their source material. In many cases, the source material they're drawing on is 1) extremely biased, 2) posits other theories that you know to be wrong, and/or 3) interpreted in a very misleading way and devoid of actual context.

• Are there footnotes/endnotes for that claim? Where did the author source their assertion? Is it a faithful reproduction of the original claim? Note that this is not a foolproof way to check if a claim is bullshit. Ideally, you would be able to follow that note to that direct claim, but I understand that not everyone has the time or the inclination to do that. A number of notes could be to interviews or other primary source material that you can't directly access. Additionally, the source itself might be wrong, but the author didn't know that at the time. However, if you do have the time and the inclination, this is a good way to go back and check.

Now here's the kicker: none of these above suggestions are bulletproof. There are always exemptions to the rules I outlined above. I've even pointed out that some of my suggestions are not perfect, and you definitely should never use one of these alone. Ultimately, you need to trust your gut. If something stands out to you as bull, it is probably something you need to verify. If you're not sure about something, ask around – you can ask your professor, you can ask your nearest historian, you can ask us, but please verify! You don't want to get an F on a paper because you read a book that claimed that Irish slaves were an actual thing and that the first slaveowner was a black man. That would not be very fun.

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Note: most of what I wrote above apply for articles and books -- so basically print literature. HOWEVER, most (if not all) of this same advice can be applied to websites.

Good luck, and happy researching!

Building a Secondary Bibliography

There are two basic skills here: (A) Sharpen that Google-fu and (B) Be lazy.

Google-fu, or, Search Term Diagrams

Especially when you have a really focused topic already, a lot of your success in finding secondary sources will result from clever manipulation of search terms. Medievalists like diagrams, so I like to picture my topic as Venn diagrams or concentric circles.

For example, say you want to write about smuggling in colonial America but you can't find much to address that specifically. Okay, what topics are "one step broader" that overlap into colonial smuggling? You come up with a list like:

• Crime in colonial America

• Trade and traders in colonial America

• Smuggling in the British Atlantic

• Seafaring and travel in the early modern world

(of course your search will look something like atlantic trade "early modern")

This kind of search term will be useful for a blunt-object approach to databases and, especially, your library catalog. Via trial and error, you will discover things like whether you need to try the same search twice, once with "medieval" and once with "Middle Ages"--basically, what the usual scholarly terminology is for your topic.

The library catalog is especially helpful because of the Library of Congress subject headings, usefully employed by WorldCat (which catalogues all the books in all the world, basically). One of the parts of a book's listing is "Subjects." These are pre-set categories that classify books. Clicking on a subject will turn up the list of other books also tagged accordingly.

Be Lazy

The real key to building a bibliography is letting other people do the work for you, because in almost all cases, they already have. In a perfect world, you are able to quickly identify a very very recent book or article on a related topic. That book's bibliography, or the sources cited in the article's footnotes, are manna from heaven.

If you have access, probably through a university, to the Dissertations and Theses Full Texts database, recent dissertations can be an exceptionally good source of bibliography. Most writers will include a literature review, hitting up the highlights of previous scholarship, as part of their introduction or the first chapter.

You might also get lucky another way. Historians love to write about historians, that is, about how historians talk about history--this is called historiography. Always do a Google search and perhaps search your databases for [topic] historiography. These articles are amazing: they will give you a good start on a bibliography, as well as an idea of the current (or not-so-current: careful on the dating here!) scholarship on the question or subject that interests you.

Especially for looking up historiography articles, remember your Google-fu!

In the Library

No, I mean, the actual physical library. "Where the books live." You know how the Library of Congress assigns subjects to a book? Well, similarly, the shelf numbers of books place (uhhhh...usually) books on similar topics near each other. So when you're pulling your targeted book off the shelf, take a look at what's around it. You might get something really good that way, that the search terms missed for whatever reason.

Obligatory Remarks

Of course it's risky to depend entirely on other scholars to "do your work." Most people with experience in academic history, from undergrad on up, have a tale of discovery of a secondary source missed by all other scholarship but really crucial. And the further into the past you go by date, the more likely you are to have missed something critical.

But standing on the shoulders of others combined with some clever manipulation of search terms in Google, library catalogs, JSTOR, ProQuest, Dissertations Full Text, and specialized databases in your field will give you a running start.

Hopefully in replies to this comment, people can add in which databases (free or proprietary) are especially helpful for their particular field. And if you have any tips or tricks to add, PLEASE I WANT THEM. And I am not alone.