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[readandwept]

One thing I haven't developed a successful routine around so far (I'm a late-stages grad student in a social science) is keeping up with the main journals in my field. I worry that this is leaving my education too narrow and will hurt me in interviews, plus I would just like to be a more well-rounded scholar in my field. There are three journals I feel like I should be reading everything in, and several more that I should probably read all the abstracts in every issue. Currently, I read journals haphazardly, and it just isn't working for me. So I'm posting this to solicit responses about what your routine is for keeping current with lit that's not directly related to your research, but is important for you to know.

[hegemony]

I don't deliberately keep up with anything that's not directly related to my research.

[totoro]

One thing I haven't developed a successful routine around so far (I'm a late-stages grad student in a social science) is keeping up with the main journals in my field. I worry that this is leaving my education too narrow and will hurt me in interviews, plus I would just like to be a more well-rounded scholar in my field. There are three journals I feel like I should be reading everything in, and several more that I should probably read all the abstracts in every issue. Currently, I read journals haphazardly, and it just isn't working for me. So I'm posting this to solicit responses about what your routine is for keeping current with lit that's not directly related to your research, but is important for you to know.

I get RSS feeds from some journals and working paper series (the NEP announcements from RePEc). I read them in Google Reader. This way when there is something new it is sitting there waiting for you.

[anon99]

Sign up for eTOCs from the journals you regularly refer to/read.  If there is a title for an article that grabs your attention, click on the link and read it.

[predoc]

I am also a graduate student and have also experienced this problem. About a year ago I started regularly reading two of the top journals in my discipline and one of the disciplinary journals for my specific area. I probably read one article a day in the evening when I'm making dinner. This helps me remain current with contemporary approaches to research without becoming too burdensome. I'm not necessarily teaching this material or discussing it in a class, so I don't read to present it or critique it. I just read to learn about new cases and to really see how people structure their arguments and make interventions. I also don't beat myself up when someone mentions an article I haven't read.

[readandwept]

Thanks to all who have replied. I'm embarrassed to say that lack of RSS sub isn't what's holding me back -- I subscribe to two of these journals on paper! (They come bundled with association memberships.) I like the idea of having a regular time to read at night while I'm making (or eating) dinner. I think that part of my problem is that I try to read too deeply, when I'd be much better off, for this stuff that I'm expected to be broadly familiar with but that isn't related to my own research, reading more widely but shallowly.

hegemony, your response is interesting to me. I'm guessing that this is a difference between your field and mine. In mine, there is a definite expectation that faculty and advanced grad students at research universities will read the main journals in the field, including articles out of their subfield. I can see how, especially for humanities fields where I have the impression that specialties are more fixed, this might not be the case.

[punchnpie]

I don't deliberately keep up with anything that's not directly related to my research.

What about related to your teaching? In my field, we frequently research in one area and teach in others. I am finding it harder to keep up with articles in my teaching areas, as I barely keep my head above water with the research-related articles.

When I re-work a syllabus for a new term, it is too easy to stay with the tried and true articles, but I've been out of school for a bit now and the articles I used as new faculty are getting old, especially tech-related articles. Maybe I shouldn't worry about it and just spend some time when I'm prepping to go over the practitioner literature. I don't know. I feel guilty about it, but guiltier that I'm barely keeping up in topics related to my research.

[hegemony]

All my undergraduate courses are at a fairly elementary level.  I don't need to keep up on the latest twists of thought about X or Y when the undergraduates are struggling to learn the vocabulary.  I am supposed to teach the graduate courses that are in my special field, and I do, so the reading for my research doubles as the reading for my graduate courses.

I haven't actually heard of anyone in my field who keeps up with the latest scholarship about topics outside their specialty.  If you were a historian who specialized in the French Revolution, would you keep up with the latest thought about the French in World War II, or about Charlemagne?  You might be trying to keep abreast of scholarship about, say, theology as it might relate to the Revolution, as well as on the politics; that would be enough of a challenge. That's not even mentioning the history of Japan or Australia, which might also be called "History" and hence "in your field." 

[totoro]

I'm not a historian, of course, but "French Revolution" sounds like a very narrow topic for a "field" to me. In economics a field would be something like "environmental and resource economics" and there are about 20-30 such fields in the discipline. Some are very big like "macro-economics". And "economic history" counts as one field. Now I might be researching the industrial revolution in Britain but I would want to keep up with developments across economic history. But no I wouldn't want to be following developments in environmental economics at all closely unless that was my angle (pollution due to industrialization for example).

[punchnpie]

I am supposed to teach the graduate courses that are in my special field, and I do, so the reading for my research doubles as the reading for my graduate courses.

I teach in a grad professional program and unfortunately reading for those courses doesn't help me.  My students go out to do work that is usually completely unrelated to my research. For example, it's as if I did research in health policy, but I taught nurses instead of public policy grad students. Yes, my readings in health policy would help me teach their one policy course, but not the other courses I teach.

To continue the example, if I try to keep up with what's going on in nursing, 1) I may not understand much of it, because it's not my field and 2) it takes time away from keeping up in health policy, which is my field and upon which my tenure will depend.

I don't know. Some faculty think we shouldn't worry about what the students do after they get out, but the problem is (at least for me) that many of our students are already working part-time in the field. They have questions about what they see in the workplace, but I have no clue.

So, I want to keep up to some degree, but it's getting harder to do so. And now I have to design a course for which I have no background at all. It's going to be like teaching 'managing surgical instruments' and I've never seen such instruments, much less actually been a nurse in an operating room. I've considered shadowing a 'nurse' for a bit, but as I mentioned, other faculty don't see a need for us to know what students do at work and that shadowing or reading in the practitioner literature diverts us from thinking about our research for tenure.

Sigh. There must be some middle ground. I don't know if this tension occurs outside of professional schools.

[hegemony]

Well, imagine the field is "French history of the Enlightenment," then.  It still wouldn't make sense to read the latest developments on Charlemagne or World War II.  I suppose you might teach those as part of a vast survey-of-European history course, but you wouldn't be teaching at a level that would require reading up on the latest thoughts about ceremonial protocol in Charlemagne's son's accession to Italy.

[totoro]

Well, imagine the field is "French history of the Enlightenment," then.  It still wouldn't make sense to read the latest developments on Charlemagne or World War II.  I suppose you might teach those as part of a vast survey-of-European history course, but you wouldn't be teaching at a level that would require reading up on the latest thoughts about ceremonial protocol in Charlemagne's son's accession to Italy.

It's probable that there are differences in the level of specialization in different disciplines. Economists can expect to get random questions about almost anything from their students, journalists etc. And I have done research on a broad range of things in terms of countries and time scales and what might look like a bizarre array of topics (imagine it was say trade unions, international migration, the housing market, and education loans - actually it would be wider than this in reality) and I'm also pretty interdisciplinary and read a bunch of stuff to get ideas about what might be interesting to investigate. Ideas can come from current events/media etc. too.

[readandwept]

Yes, I think that history and English are definitely more specialized than my social science (which isn't economics). Not sure about other humanities fields. In mine, at a top research university I think you're more or less expected to be conversant in the major paradigms in all large areas of the field, no matter how far afield they are from your own research, although of course you won't be familiar with many nuances of all areas. We do have generalist journals that you're expected to be familiar with, and in high-status talks, including job talks, people will sometimes ask you to relate your work to ideas in rather different areas of the discipline. That's the context in which I feel like I'm failing to keep up.

[totoro]

We do have generalist journals that you're expected to be familiar with, and in high-status talks, including job talks, people will sometimes ask you to relate your work to ideas in rather different areas of the discipline. That's the context in which I feel like I'm failing to keep up.

Yes, I think it is like this in economics too. Somebody might well ask - what will be the impact of the great recession on that? How does your economic history case you just gave relate to the situation today in developing countries? What happens if you assume endogenous technological change (which is economic growth theory and maybe you were talking about climate policy)? etc.

[readandwept]

Yes, that sounds a lot like my field (with the equivalent substantive content, of course), totoro. I wonder why the social sciences are so much less specialized than the humanities in this regard.