Popular science books and books on research can be very useful. The general public cannot be expected to read research articles (regrettably), so such books are excellent places to look for knowledge. Reading a good popular science book can be like being told about a hundred research articles (which you do not have the time or inclination to read yourself). Ph.D. students and starting researchers can very efficiently get up-to-date on a topic. And even experienced researchers of a closely related field stand a lot to gain from reading a competently executed summary of a research area. I have read a few dozens of those, and even when I thought I was close to being an expert on the topic, I still learned something useful. My library includes popular (social) science books on anything from the madness/wisdom of crowds to persuasion, willpower, and habits. But you have to be careful, because there are many bad popular science books out there.
Part of the problem is that many are not written by actual researchers, because very few researchers write books. I mean books on actual research. There are no incentives at all (as I commented recently here). First, the publishers will give you just a token amount per book sold, and since you cannot expect huge sales for serious research topics, it typically does not pay. Second, there are no career incentives either. A scientific career, and hence its associated tenure prospects, new job opportunities, etc, is measured by the amount (and hopefully quality) of peer-reviewed journal articles, that is, articles in internationally recognized research journals. Books are neither peer-reviewed nor original. Hence, they count zero for a scientific career. Which might be reasonable: publishing a good research article in a field as, say, economic theory will take years of effort, plus years of waiting for the referee report, plus years in the revising and re-writing process (it’s a bit quicker in other fields). For a book, you “just” need to find a publisher and the time to write it.
However, since you could have invested the time it took you to write a book in writing more articles to be submitted to journals, and those do count for your career, writing a book is a net loss for a researcher (in economic parlance, the opportunity costs are huge). No wonder researchers rarely write books. When they do, they are usually either textbooks for a subject they have been teaching for years, aimed at university students, or advanced research monographs, aimed at the academic community (as the one I wrote on The Theory of Extensive Form Games). Very rarely popular science books aimed at the general public. You see, sales for those might (just might!) be higher than those of research monographs or textbooks, but the second problem (no career incentives) still looms large.
Wait a second, there are a lot of popular science books out there, so who is writing them? Let us consider the case of popular social science books, which is closer to my field. This is actually a huge area, since it encompasses everything from applied management and social psychology to (the more serious) self-help books. And the boundaries are often sort of fuzzy. So, actually, a few actual scientists have written a few best-sellers there, speaking about their research or simply research in their field. And more than a few have tried, not quite managing to be in the best-seller list.
There is also a lot of, well, let’s say less serious stuff you can waste your time on. So, how can you tell? How can you avoid the bad books and get the little gems? You can of course look for reviews and recommendations, and there might be some of those here in the future (in the fullness of time…). But there are also a few general principles you can look at. Surprisingly, judging from my own experience, three simple tests will often help you sort out good popular-science books from blubbering wastes of time.
Credentials. The back cover, or the inside flaps, should have a few sentences on the author or authors. Look for serious credentials. For instance, for a book on management practices, one of the authors should be a professor of management in a respected university. It is OK if only one of the authors is a scientist. Since writing a book is a net loss for a scientist, often teams are formed, and this can be efficient. For instance, Roy Baumeister is a very well-known, highly respected researcher in social psychology. He wrote a very good book called Willpower. Only he is not the only author, it is coauthored with John Tierney. And who is John Tierney? A New York Times science writer. In other words, the authors are a team made out of a researcher and a journalist who specializes in science. And that is a good thing! The combination probably brought the time investment for Roy Baumeister down to an acceptable level. Also, being a scientist does not mean you have the skills or the inclination to write for a general audience. After all, you spend your time working on your communication skills targeting a specialized audience.
However, when checking out a book one needs to insist that one of the authors is a real scientist. Although there are exceptions, in general writing about science without doing science produces results akin to the old Spanish sex manuals written by Catholic priests (yes, there were a bunch of those). Beware of credentials which just state “John Doe, PhD”. You see, every scientist is a PhD, that is our tribal rite of initiation. If “PhD” is the only credential, it is no credential at all (sorry). With apologies, if somebody needs to have “PhD” after his name (or “Dr.” before it) printed in the cover of the book, I personally will not waste a second on it. We are all PhDs, so we do not write that as if it was part of the name. In the credentials, look for “Professor” instead, and check the University. Another negative tell-tale is “Author of numerous books on…” Remember, scientists do not typically write books, so unless the author is retired, in his late seventies, and has spent the last ten years after a proper career in science writing books (which might not be a bad idea), you see what that tells you.
Here is another example of a good team: the Heath brothers. One of them is a management professor at Stanford. The other is a management practitioner. An excellent combination which lets them talk about serious research and put it in perspective with wonderful real-life examples and case studies. They are extremely productive, having produced a staggering total of… three books, at the time of writing. All of them worth reading. But no, their credentials do not include “authors of numerous books.”
Endnotes and references. A serious scientific text will reference its sources with painstaking precision. Research articles are full of author-year citations which send the reader to the bibliography at the end of the article. Of course, you cannot do that in a popular science book. The readers would be scared. Or bored. But you cannot speak of research without stating, and possibly discussing, the sources. So what should be done?
The solution serious books have converged to is having endnotes. Research articles have numbered footnotes which clutter the bottom part of every other page. Scientists are specially trained in this special form of divided attention which lets you read the article while jumping back and forth to the comments in the footnotes. Serious books have endnotes which play both the role of bibliographical references and footnotes. However, a price has to be paid, and it is a fair one. You cannot scare readers by placing hundreds of numbers in text to mark the endnotes, so many books just list them by pages or a similar system. Here is how it works. While reading the book, you become aware that the authors are discussing a specific study or article, or that they are skipping details. But you want to know. Hm. Well, you are in chapter 6, page 124, so you go to the Endnotes section at the end of the book (whatever the name of that section in your book is), and there you will find dozens and dozens of notes, neatly grouped by chapters and typically referenced by the page. So you look for the entry on chapter 6, page 124, and sure enough, there is a note there explaining what you wanted to know. Hopefully.
Which gives you a five-second test to see whether a popular science book is serious. At least if you are standing in the bookshop with a physical copy in your hand. Just look at the end of the book, somewhere between the conclusion and the index. You should find a long, long list of entries, maybe in a smaller type font. Each of them will be either a short explanation or a reference to a research article, another book, or even a news item. The authors are documenting their sources. If you find this section, you can keep thinking on whether to pick up, buy, and read the book. If you do not find it, and lacking further information, it might be a good idea to just drop it there and look for another book. Well, although literally dropping it into the trash can might be entirely appropriate, since you did not buy it the bookshop owner might object, so just put it back in the shelf.
No flashy stuff. Here’s a hint: scientific articles have very few pictures, especially in the social sciences. In theoretical (read: mathematical) research, most articles have no pictures at all. In general-interest journals, there is often an upper bound on the number of pictures you can have. And it is usually a single digit. A low one. In consequence, researchers are used to put their research in words, with few pictures. In the social sciences, pictures are usually concise representations of hard data from specific studies, and that is the first thing which goes away when a scientist attempts to summarize. So a popular (social) science book written by an actual social scientist will typically (and somewhat paradoxically) have very few pictures, and none of them will be qualitative, flashy, powerpoint-like diagrams. So if you pick up a popular social science book and it has a diagram every other page, just put it down again. A flashy cover is OK: that’s what the publisher’s marketing department does. A dozen arrow diagrams? Yuck, they are just trying to sell something. No, thanks.
NOTE: A previous version of this post first appeared a couple of years ago in my university blog. Since I have taken down that one (one person, one blog seems more than enough to me), I am re-posting here slightly updated versions of some of the posts which used to be there.
Carlos' Ramblings 