Last updated on January 15, 2019
Last summer, Advice to Writers, one of my favorite blogs, had a post titled “Read Bad Stuff.” Given that Advice to Writers posts are usually very short, I reproduce the post here in full:
If you are going to learn from other writers don’t only read the great ones, because if you do that you’ll get so filled with despair and the fear that you’ll never be able to do anywhere near as well as they did that you’ll stop writing. I recommend that you read a lot of bad stuff, too. It’s very encouraging. “Hey, I can do so much better than this.” Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn’t so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. — Edward Albee.
This applies to many other areas of life, and it academic research is no exception.
Over the years, I have found that besides learning by doing (i.e., writing your own papers), one of the best ways to improve as a researcher is learn from others. Obviously, this means that you should read good papers–but not good papers exclusively.
The issue, as I see it, is that doctoral courses tend to have students read only the very best papers on any given topic. At best, a doctoral course will have students referee current working papers as an assignment, but even then, those current working papers usually tend to be selected from those of researchers who produce high-quality work.
If you were interested in knowing what makes some people poor and others not, you would need to sample both poor people and people who aren’t poor. Likewise, if you are interested in knowing what makes a piece of research good and another one not as good, it helps to read widely, and to make some time for reading bad papers. For most people, this comes in the form of refereeing, especially early on in their career.
(When I started out, a journal editor told me that “like referees like,” and I’ve found that to be true. That is, early-career researchers often review the work of other early-career researchers, and senior researchers often review the work of other senior researchers. So if you have ever asked yourself “When will I get better papers to referee?,” the answer is generally “Just wait,” assuming of course that the quality of academic output increases with time spent in a discipline.)
Many scholars–economists, in particular–see refereeing as an unfortunate tax they need to pay in order to get their own papers reviewed and published. Unlike a tax, however, there is almost always something to be learned from refereeing, and from refereeing bad papers in particular.