Finding a Research Mentor?

bsomerville writes "As an aspiring social scientist preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs, I'm keen to find a faculty mentor somewhere in North America who shares my research interests. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. While links to program websites are readily available, I'm surprised to find no comprehensive collection of faculty research interests in my field (clinical psychology). Instead this information is buried several levels down in each university website. Is this a common problem across all fields? Is there some inherent reason why no wiki-type Web resource exists to meet this need? It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users, saving countless aspiring grad students thousands of clicks through university websites."

Comments

See who's publishing in your areas of interest

[inflamed]

Use ISI Web of Knowledge. Search for the terms you are interested in. Find papers. Sort by date. Who's publishing in your field these days? This is who you want to talk to.

Re:See who's publishing in your areas of interest

[Obfiscator]

I would add something to this. It's typically better to work with someone who is well-known in the field (i.e. someone who is probably doing higher quality research). That's almost impossible to tell if you are new to the field, but ISI Web of Knowledge also lists the number of times an article has been cited. It's not a perfect measure of the usefulness of the article to the field, but it's a good zeroth-order approximation. Start with the papers which have the most citations (keeping in mind that they will be a bit older) and work your way down.

In this same line, you should figure out if you want to work for an old, established professor, or a young, up-and-coming assistant professor. The methods/environments in the two situations can be quite different, and it's good to have an idea of what you're looking for.

Re:"Is this a common problem across all fields?"

[Protonk]

I'll second this. In economics, where there is a (nominally) unified classification code for both jobs and research, most filled positions don't match the stated classification code. A professor may be hired to do time-series work but end up teaching only one time series course and supervising quantile regression work. Plenty of long-term faculty are hired under classification codes which described their early-career research interests but no more describe their current work than would your 4th grade movie tastes describe your current library. And the faculty don't bother changing that crap on the website because nobody really cares. No one who matters is going to search for faculty by the classification on the website. Press will go through a press office, colleagues will know the research and students will twist in the wind. :)

Journal articles, a library, and your professors

[syousef]

At Ph.D. prep level you should be reading research papers/journal articles to work out who's doing interesting work. You should also have networked in your undergrad and formed connections to people who can provide you with interesting opportunities in exchange for your hard work.

You certainly should not be dreaming of searchable dataases, trawling university web sites or posting to ask slashdot. That you are doing this does not bode well for your ability to complete a Ph.D.

By the way, I have no idea about psychology but preprint articles in Physics and Astronomy can be found on the net at arxiv.org. Since the journals tend to try to restrict publication for their own profits these days (espeically in medical sciences), you may need to find a library or University that you can access that has research papers for your own field. Either way if you're not interested enough to read current research articles to determine who's doing interesting work, perhaps you should be thinking about something other than a doctorate.