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."

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.

"Is this a common problem across all fields?"

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes.

Some departments do a very good job of organizing their faculty lists by research interest. Some don't. Unfortunately, it's almost completely up to whoever the department hires to do their web site design (or they use a school-wide template, but in that case, it's up to whoever designs the template.) AFAIK, there's no real standard in any field -- not even in CS, which seems like it would be the most likely place for such a standard to emerge.

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

[Protonk]

I'll second this. In economics, where there is a (nominally) unified classification code [aeaweb.org] 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.

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:See who's publishing in your areas of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to your favorite search engine and look for "conference or journal ranking clinical psychology".

Pick the first three or four of them and look at the papers that have been published and by whom. A good professor might have several papers there.

Find where he is and contact him/her. You might want to be bold enough to call the professor on the phone, since they receive tons of applications via email. Some of my friends did it and it worked for them.

You have to start applying very early as the application process can take several months in good university.

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

[wmac]

In ISI web of knowledge it is possible to categorize papers by publishing year. You can then select the last 4-5 years and then download a list of all those papers (if you have endnote or endnote web you can even download most of the papers).

You can for example search on specific terms, and then limit to a time period, number of citations and other criteria and hopefully get a very good starting point for reading and literature review.

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

[xtracto]

I would mod you up (have mod points) but I see you are already at 5. Unfortunately it seems ISI WoK is not free to access (and papers are mainly non-free.

Instead I would suggest to also look for the Public Library of Science [plos.org](PLoS one) or Scirus [scirus.com].

If possible, Scopus [scopus.com] is a really really *great* resource to find papers. Unfortunately it is also non-free.