Background

I have just been reading Vladimir M. Moskovkin’s (2024) article Origin and Evolution of the Publish or Publish Phenomenon in the literary world. Universities take it as a matter of life and death in career development in the world of scholasticism and academicism.

Prof William Morris Davis used the phrase much earlier than others did, in 1904, while advising the Association of American Geographers in a meeting thus: “The Association “publish or perish”. No doubt, therefore, William Morris Davis was one of the first people known to have emphasised the need to “publish or perish”. He added, “If it is worth doing, it is worth printing! No opportunity to print is afforded, then the well of inspiration dries up”.

There is no evidence to suggest that Prof W.M Morris Davis wanted the phrase to apply to just academics. However, the use of “publish or perish” in the promotion of academic staff at universities has become a universal phenomenon too. Publish or Perish became cast as a principle and the catchphrase for the academic world of the 20th century. However, the volume and quality of publications differed between universities, departments and even between continents, as I once showed in one of my articles. Above all, it became a slogan of the 20th century that is still with us in the 21st century; a century of knowledge integration and reintegration.

Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs has admitted that he couldn’t have survived today’s academic system. He published less than 10 papers after making his breakthrough scientific discovery and has gone on the record saying, “Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that.” Goreact says, “If even Nobel laureates can’t succeed in our system, then it’s definitely time for some changes here. Is there a quick fix? Probably not. But the important thing is to start exploring solutions now so we can get the wheels moving in the right direction. Publish or perish may steal attention away from teaching, but, according to Goreact, an estimated 62 per cent of professors worldwide agree that teaching well should be the primary factor for promotion in an academic career. Thus, more importance should be given to teaching of students.

Early knowledge workers, who were mainly philosophers, such as Socrates, emphasised teaching to educate society and transform it, not individual glorification for career success. Careerism and instruction can be treated as essential aspects of academic life. Publish or Perish has become both an attitude of mind and a mentality. To reverse this back to teaching as the principal focus of education is the challenge of the 21st century. If we teach well, we shall have graduates who can engage in critical thinking and reasoning, less fearful, less docile and less manipulatable and more dynamic and influential across the ivory tower-society divide. We shall have future-ready professionals.

Publish or Perish in Practice

Universities all over the world value the phrase “Publish or Perish” because of their strict commitment to academicism, scholasticism and careerism in their body politic. To many academic knowledge workers, the phrase sends them into a frenzy because getting funds to do research and publish, or even to get access to renowned journals, may be as difficult as going to heaven.

There are varying perceptions and descriptions among academic knowledge workers and academic writers of the phrase “Publish or Perish”. These are some of the descriptions: phenomenon, principle, mentality, culture, jargon, syndrome, aphorism and slogan.

Whatever, the description, there is no doubt that the phrase “publish or perish” has had tremendous influence on knowledge production, democratic practice and justice in the university’s body politic. In the strictly disciplinary university knowledge production is by individual knowledge workers, mainly for career growth and development of the individual. Teamwork is an anathema since it contradicts individual growth and development. 

There is an emerging school of thought questioning the ultimate value of the phrase publish or perish in the growth and development of academia in the 21st century and beyond given the emergence of new cultures of knowledge production, which de-emphasise individual achievement and glorification in favour of co-production of knowledge, team achievement and team glorification. The new knowledge production cultures are interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity (or nondisciplinarity. All these stress multi-stake holder involvement of others active in the knowledge production enterprise.

When I suggested the above-mentioned topic and posted it on my popular Facebook page for discussion, I received a number of views from academics in the UK, Germany and South Africa in addition to Uganda. These are some of the responses I received:

• “Because in the university you are at the pinnacle of knowledge. You are expected to come with new ideas to improve society. If you don’t come up with new ideas in which entrepreneurs can monetise you perish. Also you will lose your academic status and, therefore, perish”.
• Prof.  Michael Ameny, Germany

“For sure and that is the main difference between African universities and Western ones. There is too much teaching in African universities. As such, students are conditioned to rely on their “teachers’’ whose notes and words become the “truths’’.  That’s the origin of ”cramming’’ philosophy in education. We are producing more crammers than innovators but the paradox is that we want them to be job creators”

• Cankech JB Onencan, PhD student, University of Toronto, Canada.
• “Publish or perish has had its downsides in African universities. One academic at Makerere University told me that since it was publications in academic journals that would help him advance, he was doing as little as possible in teaching. Thus, the synergy between teaching and research is lost. Universities these days are assessed on three criteria: teaching, research and student experience. By the way, on another matter – what I have seen in Rome – is universities entering into cooperation contracts with other international universities”.
• Dr Amos Kasibante, United Kingdom.

• “The saying ‘publish or perish’ is a well-known phrase at universities the world over. It is normally used because it captures the pressure universities exert on academics to publish. It epitomises the expectation placed on academics and researchers to constantly publish their work in order to advance their careers and maintain their positions within academia. It sort of says, “no publications, no promotion, no advancement”.

It is sort of a threat designed to keep academics publishing…The underlying rationale behind this phrase is that in the academic world, the primary currency for success and recognition is the publication of original research and scholarly work. The more an academic publishes, the more they are seen as productive, influential, and valuable to their institution and the academic community as a whole. Therefore, this “publish or perish” mentality stems from the following:

Tenure and promotion

In many universities, the path to tenure and promotion is heavily dependent on an individual’s publication record. Academics are expected to demonstrate a sustained and substantial output of peer-reviewed research publications in order to be considered for tenure or promotion.

Funding and grants

Securing research funding and grants often requires a strong publication history that demonstrates the researcher’s ability to conduct and disseminate high-quality research.

Reputation and visibility

Publishing in reputable academic journals and conferences can enhance an individual’s reputation and visibility within their field, which can lead to collaborative opportunities, invitations to speak at events, and increased recognition among their peers.

Your alternative phrase ‘publish and prosper’ suggests a more balanced approach, where the emphasis is not solely on the quantity of publications, but also on the quality and impact of the research. It carries no threat in it. It encourages academics to focus on producing meaningful, high-quality work that can contribute to their field and have a lasting impact, rather than simply chasing publication numbers. Thus the ‘publish and proper’ perspective acknowledges that the ‘publish or perish’ mentality can sometimes lead to a focus on quantity over quality, where academics may rush to publish in lower-quality journals or engage in questionable practices in order to meet the publication demands.

By emphasising the importance of producing impactful research and publications, the ‘publish and prosper’ approach aims to foster a more sustainable and rewarding academic culture. Therefore, ultimately, the balance between ‘publish or perish’ and ‘publish and prosper’ is an ongoing debate within academia, as institutions and individuals seek to strike a balance between the need for productivity and the desire for meaningful, high-quality research contributions,” explains Dr Anthony Isabirye, a lecturer in South Africa.

The overwhelming support of the publish or perish phenomenon in universities, however, has not prevented many knowledge workers at diverse university campuses all over the world from viewing it as the main reason why the value of critical thinking, reasoning and intellectualism in the academia has declined with the passage of time.  

Meanwhile there is what is called “academic jargon”. According to Oxford Brookes University. Jargon is the highly specialised terminology used by a specific area or profession. These terms are not usually understood by people outside that area. Jargon can help communicate specific concepts, but it can also make things less obvious or less accessible to outsiders.  Discourse is another jargon meaning written or spoken communication. Each university subject has its own specialised discourse to communicate concepts in a concise and authoritative way.

In other words, knowledge workers in different knowledge areas tend to communicate only to themselves and to very narrow audiences. Oxford Brookes University cautions:  “The best academic writing expresses ideas clearly. You need to use specialist terms accurately to show that you understand them. However, you don’t need to copy the style of a lot of journal articles as many of these are written for very narrow audiences and are written by academics showing off. You don’t need to find fancier sounding synonyms or use lots of long words to communicate your ideas well.”

Ivory towerism

One reason universities are called “ivory towers” is that, through their generally similar structure and function and the tendency for scholars to construct communication styles that only allow communication with and in narrow audiences, they are places or spheres where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world.

It’s common to talk about colleges and universities as “intellectual ivory towers” even if the intellectual aspect of life has greatly declined in colleges and universities. When one is in an ivory tower, one lives in a world of ideas separate from the realities of the other pockets of knowledge workers and of most people’s lives. If one is in an ivory tower, which is the case for most college and university-based scholars, then one lives in a world of ideas separate from the realities of most people’s lives.

An individual in such situation may be referred to as an ivory tower. When one is called an ivory tower, it means one’s work prevents one from experiencing the problems that are experienced by ordinary people in society. One remains generally unaware of these problems. This could educate leaders of countries who do not separate knowledge from practice and rush to coopt knowledge workers from colleges and universities, thinking that they will help to solve people’s and societies’ collective problems. Many times, they become the new problem since throughout their education they were separate from the total society and total environment. Most academic workers fail to deliver outside the ivory tower.

From what the various respondents to my topic submitted, publication is one of the few powerful methods at a scholar’s disposal to demonstrate academic talent to their peers; not to society. 

When a scholar publishes his or her research results successfully in refereed journals, he or she attracts the attention and recognition of other scholars within and beyond his or her university, usually in the same discipline. As Dr Anthony Isabirye surmised, the published work, depending on its quality, will attract funding for the university as well as secure the writer upward mobility. Academic institutions and/or universities find publications an easier means of measuring the competency of a scholar. As one academic writer has explicitly put it, “Scholars. who publish infrequently or who focus on activities such as instructing undergraduates and postgraduates or intellectual development of the students, will find themselves excluded from the upward mobility. This is of course anti-justice and anti-democratic since a holistic university requires excellent researchers, excellent teachers and excellent intellectuals who can help develop the intellectual capacities of the students, the intellectual capital of the university and clarify and articulate issues for society”.

The pressure to publish is not about to relax so long as individual academic growth and glorification continues to be universally emphasized by universities all over the world within the context of global higher education. However, some academic scholars have pointed out the disadvantages of pressurising academics to publish in order to move up the academic ladder. One scholar has written

• The emphasis on publishing has decreased the value of the resulting scholarship as scholars must spend time scrambling to publish whatever they can manage, rather than spend time developing significant research agenda.
• The time and effort of the professors are detracted away from teaching and supervising undergraduate and post-graduates.
• The rewards for exceptional teaching rarely match the rewards for exceptional research, which encourages faculty to favour the latter whenever they conflict.
• Many universities do not focus on teaching ability when they hire new faculty and simply look at the publications list. This single-minded focus on the professor-as-researcher may cause faculty to neglect or be unable to perform some other responsibilities, such as teaching, supervision and public intellectualism.
• Critical thinking and reasoning, which should be central to university education are removed from the knowledge enterprise, so that the products are incapacitated when they get out of the university. Such people are easy for an adroit leader or ruler to manipulate. They are likely to be docile and almost universally assume a conspiracy of silence in the face of oppression, suppression and repression.

Besides, a lot of the published research is proven to have limited value. This can partly be explained by the phenomenal growth in the number of journals published, which is producing a genre of predatory journals that do not maintain requisite quality and ethical standards (Sangeeta Saxena, Thomas Godfrey, John Yannessa, 2023). It is not uncommon to find articles in journals, which have not been cited by anybody and, therefore, contributing nothing to the growth and development of scholars in a university. This is not unlike theses, which have stayed on the shelves of university libraries for decades without anybody opening them to consult and cite them in his or her work.

As Dr Anthony Isabirye has ably submitted, excessive pressure to publish can lead to academic impropriety, emphasis on quantity rather than quality and various malpractices. Such malpractices may include forgery, inclusion of trivial studies, piecemeal or multiple reporting and the inclusion of fake authors (e.g. Uzobo, 2019). Therefore, the practice of publish or perish runs the risk of emphasising ‘productivity’ at the expense of ‘innovation.’ It also begets serious possibilities of scientific practice based on flawed evidence (e.g., Vurayai and Ndofirepi, 2022 cited by Olutayo K. Osunsan, et al, 2022). Sometimes, to convince their peers, scholars may exclude negative aspects of their research results from their articles.

All indications are that universities are not about to drop the publish or perish phenomenon as the means of academic survival in academia as long as disciplinary knowledge production continues to predominate as the preferred knowledge production culture at the expense of other knowledge production cultures (i.e., interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity or nondisciplinarity). This is a carryover from the 20th century. This is likely to impact democratic development and justice building negatively both inside and outside the universities well in the future. Where institutions and individuals focus narrowly they perceive only bits of the whole and are often incapacitated in terms of critical thinking and reasoning.

As academics continue to prefer to write to themselves for approval by themselves or their kind in other universities, they will continue to shun their responsibility to democracy, preferring a conspiracy of silence instead. Ronald J. Daniels 2021) has written in The Atlantic thus: “Institutions of higher education have remained, at best, bit players in the project of educating the citizenry.”

Consequently, many young people are entering positions of leadership and governance when they chorus democracy as just a slogan. They are poorly developed politically and are generally politically illiterate by the time they emerge out of their universities. In Uganda debates in the universities are more or less squeezed out. Debates, used to help students develop politically and raise their political literacy. Focus is on academicism and scholasticism. The impact of this on society is that we have leaders whom we cannot rely on to protect our human rights, citizenship, independence and sovereignty. They end up joining the chain of people misappropriating public funds for primitive accumulation of wealth, a vice which they end up praising

Sarah Custer (2024) writes that publish or perish sums up what many researchers at universities and colleges across the world understand about their careers. The constant reminder to academics is: “If you want to stick around, get your work published in high-impact journals.”

However, we now have a girth of substandard journals where many academics have run to keep themselves afloat in the world of careerism, which is lowering the quality of published work. Also, peerism in publishing is working negatively on quality, as academics tend to write to themselves and approve their worth to each other instead of the world of practice and society, which should be consuming their work. Vladimir M. Moskovkin (2024), cited by Sarah Custer (2024), warns that “if the publish or perish syndrome, and the highly competitive, commercially driven research environment it describes, continue, it will be replaced by ‘publish best or do not publish at all”.

Meanwhile as Goreact recommends, there’s nothing more important to the future of your field [of knowledge] than young new minds. To keep your area of study growing and thriving, pass on your passion to your students and help them develop valuable skills they’ll use long after they leave your class.

Before I end this article let me refocus on what Dr Anthony Isabirye wrote in response to my topic: “Publish and prosper” suggests a more balanced approach, where the emphasis is not solely on the quantity of publications, but also on the quality and impact of the research. It carries no threat in it. It encourages academics to focus on producing meaningful, high-quality work that can contribute to their field and have a lasting impact, rather than simply chasing publication numbers. Thus the “publish and proper” perspective acknowledges that the “publish or perish” mentality can sometimes lead to a focus on quantity over quality, where academics may rush to publish in lower-quality journals or engage in questionable practices in order to meet the publication demands. By emphasising the importance of producing impactful research and publications, the “publish and prosper” approach aims to foster a more sustainable and rewarding academic culture. Therefore, ultimately, the balance between “publish or perish” and “publish and prosper” is an ongoing debate within academia, as institutions and individuals seek to strike a balance between the need for productivity and the desire for meaningful, high-quality research contributions.”

I will now end the article, not with a conclusion, but with questions mostly borrowed from Quora:

• Is the publish or perish really an inescapable reality in academia?
• What would be a better alternative to publish or perish for promoting growth in academia?
• Why don’t academics regularly publish their negative results?
• Isn’t the practice of publish or perish the research study arena where people publish just to remain relevant and competitive for grants, tenure, etc.?
• Does publish or perish apply to tenured professors?
• When did publish or perish become a trend in scientific research?
• How can one financially delink oneself from academia in order to conduct research independently without the publish or perish mentality?
• Why does Publish or perish persist?
• Is the publish or perish culture good for knowledge production
• Does the culture of Publish or Perish affect the quality of research and knowledge?
• How could we remove the Publish or Perish mindset from academic research.
• Does publish or perish kill innovation?
• Are there ways one can personally seek innovation despite the publish or perish atmosphere?

If you don’t comprehend the article well, pardon me. I have written it quickly to get ideas quickly. A future rethinking of the article will make it more easily comprehensible to those less or not familiar with the academic world.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda