Graduate school involves learning much more than the content of a particular discipline. The books, essays, and papers collected here offer useful perspectives on scientific reasoning, learning, conducting research, ecology and evolution, and academic life. Recommendations are not intended as required reading or endorsements of every argument presented, but as starting points for reflection and discussion.
Science is often presented as an accumulation of established knowledge, while research is fundamentally concerned with what remains unknown. Firestein offers an accessible discussion of how scientists identify productive questions, work with uncertainty, and use the limits of current knowledge to guide new research.
Recommended by: Austin Mast (faculty)
Researchers routinely encounter quantitative claims presented through statistics, figures, models, and data visualizations. Bergstrom and West provide a practical introduction to recognizing misleading uses of data and evaluating whether the evidence presented actually supports a claim. The broader lesson, interrogate evidence rather than being impressed by its presentation, is especially valuable in scientific research.
Recommended by: Shelly Gaynor (faculty)
Scientists are trained to prioritize accuracy and completeness, but effective communication also depends on structure. Olson argues that scientific ideas are easier to understand and remember when they are organized as narratives rather than presented as disconnected facts. The book is especially useful for thinking about talks, papers, grant proposals, and other situations where researchers must guide an audience through a scientific argument.
Recommended by: Laura Anthony (EERDG)
Graduate students must retain information from coursework, scientific literature, teaching, and independent study. Make It Stick discusses research on learning and emphasizes strategies such as retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. It is particularly useful for reconsidering familiar but often inefficient study habits such as repeated rereading.
Recommended by: Josh Rowe (EERDG)
Dweck's distinction between fixed and growth mindsets provides a useful framework for thinking about how people respond to difficulty, criticism, and failure. These experiences are unavoidable in research, where experiments fail and skills develop gradually. The growth-mindset framework is best approached as a perspective for thinking about learning rather than as a universal explanation of achievement.
Recommended by: Josh Rowe (EERDG)
Kahneman introduces a broad framework for thinking about intuitive and deliberative judgment and explores heuristics, biases, probability, and decision-making. These ideas provide useful vocabulary for considering how scientists interpret evidence and make decisions. Readers should be aware that some findings discussed in the book have subsequently been reevaluated as psychological research has confronted questions of replication and reproducibility.
Recommended by: Josh Rowe (EERDG)
This collection brings together influential papers that helped shape modern ecology. Reading foundational work in its original form provides historical context that textbooks often cannot: how important questions were originally framed, what evidence was available at the time, and how concepts that now seem familiar developed through scientific debate.
Recommended by: Tom Miller (faculty)
Building on the historical perspective of Foundations of Ecology, this collection brings together influential ecological literature from a more recent period in the development of the field. Reading these papers in their original context helps reveal how major ecological questions, methods, and theoretical debates developed over time rather than appearing fully formed in textbooks.
Recommended by: Tom Miller (faculty)
Travis examines the changing role of natural history within ecology, evolution, and behavioral science and argues for the continued importance of careful observation and detailed knowledge of organisms. The paper is useful for graduate students because it highlights the relationship between natural history, hypothesis formation, and the broader development of scientific questions.
Recommended by: Grace Soltis (EERDG)
This book provides a practical perspective on academic career preparation, including CVs, job applications, interviews, professional communication, and the structure of the academic job market. Because hiring practices vary substantially among disciplines and continue to change, its recommendations are most useful when considered alongside current advice from mentors and recent applicants in your field.
Recommended by: Carlie Ochoa (EERDG)
This collection is intended to grow through recommendations from EERDG members. If a book, essay, or paper has meaningfully influenced how you approach research, teaching, graduate school, or scientific thinking, consider recommending it for inclusion. Contact information for the current EERDG cabinet is available on the About EERDG page. Resource descriptions are currently supplied by AI overview. Recommenders are invited to provide a brief synopsis of the suggested work.