20th September, 2021

On the bus into the office this morning, I was chipping away at a textbook. Rather than staring blankly out the window, torn between writing a paper and more playtime with my kids (a torturous daily occurrence), I calmed and focused my thoughts around a textbook. It’s something I haven’t dedicated much time to in the decade or so since I left undergraduate study, but I’m now renewing my love for textbooks (or at least their virtual lightweight forms)…and here’s why:

My fellowship, and I dare say an increasing number of scientific fellowships, are (buzzword alert) multidisciplinary in nature. They are at the edge of one field of study and another. Some phenomena are obvious on one side of the fence, and completely revolutionary on the other. The trade off for the privilege of working in such a space is the energy and effort required to be able to speak two languages full of jargon rather than just one. Textbooks are a great way to tackle that intimidating challenge. As an academic, it’s so very easy to become obsessed with what is happening in the literature right now. Who has published the latest and greatest in my field today, this week, this month? Supreme kudos to my colleagues who have a passionate penchant for such voracious timekeeping. As a slow reader, I am more of a batch processor. I can’t do the daily drip feed the way some others can. So, on the flipside of the daily read is a textbook. A textbook will not keep you up-to-date…but it can get you up to speed.

If you do try to approach multidisciplinary work, consider just how intimidating the primary research literature might appear if you don’t yet have a clue about the acronyms, the jargon, the history, or the ‘big names’ involved in that area of study. Well before anyone is ever at the age of considering independent research, such confidence issues in learning pop p in the undergraduate sphere. Such is the focus on exams within certain classes and subdisciplines of study that one can so easily become subconsciously trained to think:

“I’ve never studied X, therefore I can’t ever do y.”

“I’m not qualified in A, so I’ve never even thought of trying B.”

“I’m not a P, so there’s no way I can ever learn Q.”

Sound familiar? If such thoughts persist to make you doubt that you can learn enough of a new subject to do research at the edge of it, consider again the textbook. The point is not to keep you up-to-date, but to get you up to speed! The incentives behind a textbook are different from writing a paper. It’s less about reporting your team’s latest efforts, seeking citations, and ingratiating yourself to research evaluators, it’s about learning, education, and providing historical context. Who knows? Once you do take those baby steps to get up to speed, you might be able to see flaws in a discipline’s thinking that have built up over many years…flaws that would be missed by those thinking solely inside the boundaries of that discipline as it stands.

What textbooks might you grab in order to get you up to speed and later bring an old field up-to-date?

If you have a question for Marc, upload an audio recording for it to be featured on a later Q&A episode!