The research desk

Books and tools for academic writers.

Books worth keeping within reach if you are writing papers, learning LaTeX, answering questions about your methods or looking for an academic job. Each one has a note on who it is for, including when it has aged.

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Books

Writing papers

Six books on argument, structure and sentences. If you read only one, start with Writing Science or The Craft of Research, depending on whether your field runs on data or on argument.

Joshua Schimel

Writing Science

Written for scientists, and most useful once the data are in but the paper does not yet say why they matter. Schimel treats a paper as a story built around a problem and works through openings, paragraphs and sentences with real examples.

Find it on Amazon → Booth, Colomb, Williams, Bizup and FitzGerald

The Craft of Research

How to turn a topic into a question and a question into an argument a reader will accept. Useful in the first year of a PhD, and still useful when you are advising one.

Find it on Amazon → Helen Sword

Stylish Academic Writing

Sword studied a large sample of published articles across disciplines and shows what the readable ones do differently. A good book for anyone who has been told their prose is dense.

Find it on Amazon → Paul J. Silvia

How to Write a Lot

A short book about one idea: schedule writing like a class you teach, and keep to the schedule. Written by a psychologist for academics, and readable in an afternoon.

Find it on Amazon → Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

They Say / I Say

Templates for the moves academic argument depends on: summarizing others, agreeing or disagreeing, and saying why it matters. Aimed at undergraduates, but it helps any literature review that reads like a list.

Find it on Amazon → Steven Pinker

The Sense of Style

A linguist on why some sentences are hard to read, including the curse of knowledge that makes experts write badly for other experts. Less about papers than about sentences, which is where most revision happens.

Find it on Amazon →

Books

LaTeX

Most LaTeX questions are answered faster by a search than a book. These are for when you want to understand what the system is doing.

Frank Mittelbach, Ulrike Fischer and others

The LaTeX Companion

The reference for which packages exist and how to configure them. You will not read it front to back; you open it when a table, float or bibliography will not do what you want.

Find it on Amazon → Leslie Lamport

LaTeX: A Document Preparation System

The user's guide by the person who wrote LaTeX. Short, and still the clearest explanation of why structure and appearance are kept apart. The current edition is from 1994, so pair it with a newer reference for packages.

Find it on Amazon → Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly

Guide to LaTeX

A tutorial and a reference in one volume, for someone who wants to learn LaTeX properly rather than edit a template until it compiles. The fourth edition dates from 2003, so some package advice has aged.

Find it on Amazon →

Books

Statistics and methods you'll be asked about

Reviewers ask about models, estimates and figures. These three make those questions easier to answer.

Richard McElreath

Statistical Rethinking

A course in Bayesian modelling that starts from scratch and builds to multilevel models and causal diagrams. Worth reading even if you never fit a Bayesian model, because it changes what you think a regression is telling you.

Find it on Amazon → Andrew Gelman, Jennifer Hill and Aki Vehtari

Regression and Other Stories

Regression taught through real examples, with close attention to what goes wrong: measurement, causal claims and interpreting a coefficient. Useful when a reviewer asks what your estimate actually means.

Find it on Amazon → Edward R. Tufte

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

The book behind most advice on charts: show the data, and remove whatever does not carry information. Read it before you make the figures, not after a reviewer comments on them.

Find it on Amazon →

Books

Surviving the academic job

Karen Kelsky

The Professor Is In

Direct advice on the academic job market: CVs, cover letters, job talks and negotiating an offer. Written for US tenure-track searches, and plain about how they work.

Find it on Amazon → Wendy Laura Belcher

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks

A workbook that takes a seminar paper or thesis chapter to a submitted article, one week at a time. The chapters on finding your argument and choosing a journal are the most useful for first-time authors.

Find it on Amazon →

Hardware