Several people who are applying to graduate school have looked at my CV and noticed that I’ve written a few encyclopedia articles and book reviews. They sometimes ask me how they can do they same to help their chances of getting into graduate school. I thought I might share my little bit of advice here.

The Main Advice

The first thing to understand is this: encyclopedia articles and book reviews won’t help you get into graduate school. Or, to put that somewhat less bluntly, writing book reviews and encyclopedia articles is among the least helpful things you could do to get into graduate school.

The reason is that publications in the humanities are ranked on a definitive scale. You’ve probably heard about the relative value of publications for tenure; it’s the same general idea for graduate school applications. Three factors make a publication really count: whether it’s original, whether it’s based on primary sources, and whether it’s peer-reviewed. Encyclopedia articles and book reviews miss out on all three counts: they don’t say anything original, they’re based on secondary sources, and they’re not peer-reviewed.

My guess is that the hierarchy of publications that will help you get into graduate school looks something like this:

  1. A peer-reviewed article in a professional journal
  2. A presentation of original research at a professional conference
  3. A peer-reviewed article in a graduate journal
  4. A presentation of original research at a graduate conference
  5. A book review in a professional journal
  6. An encyclopedia article
  7. A book review in a graduate journal

Of course, the higher a publication is on that prestige spectrum, the less likely it is that you’ll succeed at accomplishing it before your applications are due. I suggest that you try at several levels at once. Send one article to a journal, and present another at a conference; try to write an encyclopedia article and a book review. But concentrate your efforts on what will really help you get into graduate school: having an original article based on primary research published in a peer-reviewed journal.

That’s not to discourage you from writing encyclopedia articles and book reviews. I’ve enjoyed doing so very much. Just be realistic: the Ivies aren’t going to swoon over your five-hundred-word encyclopedia article. You should write them for their own rewards, which I’ll try to describe in a later post.

And who knows? Maybe writing encyclopedia articles and book reviews will help you more than I’ve suggested here. At the least, you can mention them in your statement of purpose as an indication that you’re seriously interested in writing and doing history.

Writing Encyclopedia Articles

It’s pretty easy  to write for encyclopedias. Publishers will send out calls for contributors, and then you can respond to them. Usually if you tell them you’re a graduate student and send them your CV, they’ll let you write. Sometimes the publisher will even pay you as it promised, though it usually takes them a couple of years. Once you’ve written for a publisher, they sometimes send you more calls for contributors to other encyclopedias.

The best place I know to find calls for contributors are the H-Net lists. They’re electronic mailing lists for scholars of the humanities. A few are general, but most are specific to a subject or time period. The H-Announce list gives all the announcements like calls for contributors. In the e-mails sent out from the list, look under the publication heading. There is a mailing list specifically for graduate students, called H-Grad. If you’re not subscribed, you should join. I’ve found it helpful for asking questions and for seeing what other graduate students are doing. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I’m one of the editors of the H-Grad list. )

Writing Book Reviews

Book reviews are a little harder to break into, but they’re still manageable. There are two kinds of journals—professional journals, and graduate student journals. Most professional journals solicit reviews, meaning they ask people to do the reviews, rather than letting people ask to review. And most professional journals only let you review if you have a PhD in hand. Still it doesn’t hurt to try.  Pick the top five or so journals that you read and would like to review for. Then find their websites and look up their reviewing policies. Unless they specifically say no grad students, send them an e-mail and volunteer to review. I came close to reviewing for a professional journal. The editor was very kind and turned me down gently, saying that he preferred that graduate-student reviewers be further along than I was. At the time, I was just applying to PhD programs. If I had already been accepted or had been a second- or third-year student, I probably could have reviewed for that journal.

So, being graduate students, take what you can get and review for graduate journals. They’re a bit harder to find, but you should be able to find one or two that will let you review. As a side benefit, you get a free book.

Don’t Be Afraid of No

As you try to get published, don’t be afraid of someone telling you no. After all, the nos don’t go on the CV; only the yeses do. (Of course, it won’t do to annoy that editors of journals—future colleagues—who someday later might let you write for them. So be polite, only ask once, and follow through with anything you agree to do.) And there’s no opportunity that’s too small. With a little experience, you can make a better case to the next publication.