Cold Emailing: Build connections and more by reaching out to scholars that interest you
“Why can’t I just email the author and go “Your paper, this one, its so cool, wanna science together!?””
This was a comment a friend and colleague of mine said while we were studying for our master’s degrees in experimental psychology. Like many grad programs much of our time was unstructured, meant to allow us to determine how we wanted to grow in our expertise of various literatures and which skills we wanted to practice. My colleague and I spent most of this time in the grad student lounge reading papers tied to our interests, analyzing our data, and writing up drafts of our dissertations.
However, every once in a while, we’d come across a paper so interesting we’d stop everything we were doing – share it with the other and geek out over how amazing that article was. Whether it was the excellent writing style, ingenious experimental design, or in one instance, the ability of one team to recruit over 9000 in person participants (that last one still blows me away to this day), we’d pause, make a fresh cup of tea and get excited over some piece of research that just spoke to us.
After many a times of this happening one day the idea came along, what if we emailed some of the authors of these papers? Can we even do that? These are academics, people with PhDs and busy schedules. But what do we say? Uuugh, sorry to interrupt but I thought your paper was really interesting. Yeah no duh of course they know its interesting, why else would they write it.
But, collaboration is one of the best deterrents to self-doubt. And slowly but surely, my colleague and I tried our hand at emailing a few authors. We’d start small – maybe just a compliment; something along the lines of:
Dear [author]
Reaching out as I really enjoyed your article on [subject], I found the writing to be really engaging and the findings so important for future work. I shared it with one of my colleagues and we had a great time reading it over”.
Best,
[Name]
Now I’m not gonna lie to you, some of those emails never got responses. But, individually, my colleague and I did start to get a few positive replies, mostly in the form of brief thank yous. Turns out, despite of holding PhDs and being professors – the people we emailed were not as scary as we thought – expressing us well wishes and thanking us for reaching out. Turns out the people we thought were stoic geniuses actually appreciated getting emails that someone enjoyed their work. I mean think about it, peer review isn’t always the kindest space and by the time you get a project published you’re usually kind of just over it. So hearing from someone who just genuinely liked your article can feel pretty nice.
But after a while we expanded on this – at the time I wasn’t entirely sure what topic I wanted to focus on for my PhD so I started reaching out to authors of papers I enjoyed and would ask if they were open to speaking more about their article. And let me tell you, soon I found myself scheduling video call after video call to speak about ideas and potential projects. This got as far as planning out a PhD project with one professor and during that meeting sketching out the overarching research proposal. Sadly that project didn’t get funded – but I made a solid research connection – someone who was open to speaking with me about my work and what I was interested in.
When I worked a research associate role after my masters I continued this trend – reaching out to profs whose research I found interesting and emailing authors whose work I liked. Sometimes leading to a brief email correspondence, sometimes to one or two video calls. After taking a few years off from academia after my masters, it was this approach that got me a PhD offer, wherein I reached out to a professor whose research interests seemed aligned with mine, scheduled a few back and forth phone calls to discuss potential fit, and then was told to apply for the position with that individual’s plan to explicitly recommend me for the program.
During my PhD I found cold-emailing study authors and professors to be a vital part of my PhD experience. On multiple occasions I aimed to replicate previous findings from specific studies and when I found myself stumped on a particular part of how the previous authors analyzed their data, or how they set up a particular condition; there I was shooting off an email. From there I received clarifications, even code examples to help me out.
As time went on, I developed a real comfortability with cold emailing professors and authors of papers I really enjoyed. This proved invaluable as I collaborated with professors on projects tied to my PhD coursework. In two instances I essentially created my own courses with professors I found who had skills I wanted to learn. These experiences were some of the most valuable during my entire PhD and provided me with some of the best training I received.
As I was working on my doctoral thesis, I had a lot of doubts about how much of the literature I had truly mastered. Was I thinking about the literature the way the experts do? Did I have a strong grasp on the current gaps, and how was my research addressing them? Turns out there was a scholar who had published a paper I really enjoyed in the area that I was focusing my thesis on. A few emails later and we were on a zoom call and we shared a lovely chat on the nature of their work, where mine intersected and planned out potential collaborative projects. During that call was one of the first times I really began to feel like an expert in my field as I was sharing ideas with another scholar in the area and expressing my honest takes on the broader literature.
As I navigate the post PhD life, one thing remains for certain, I’m always up to reach out to a prof, share what I enjoy about their work and see if there’s space for a chat, you never know where it can take you.
About the Author
Devin L Johnson holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from McMaster University where his doctoral research focused on studying blatant dehumanization and how to best measure it in laboratory settings. His scholarly interests also include critical perspectives on psychology, including how psychological research is impacted by broader socio political and economic forces, as well as the use and misuse of quantitative methods within the discipline. In addition to being an academic, Devin has worked as a data analyst in areas such as marketing and education. In his downtime he can be found working on his photography, rock climbing, and over thinking which turtleneck to wear before going to work.
