Little is known about reading ability among doctoral students. Thus, we used a fully mixed concurrent equal status design (Leech & Onwuegbuzie, 2009) to examine 205 doctoral students in the College of Education and their reasons for reading research articles. A thematic analysis revealed 5 themes (subsumed by 2 meta-themes) explaining reasons for reading. A series of canonical correlation analyses revealed statistically significant multivariate relationships between reasons for reading empirical articles and (a) reading intensity (i.e., frequency of reading empirical research articles, number of empirical research articles read each month) and (b) reading ability (i.e., reading comprehension, reading vocabulary). The implications of these and other findings are discussed.