Researcher blogs

How “Publish or Perish” pushes researchers out of academia

In the last post, I covered some of the reasons why researchers are leaving academia. In this section, I want to tackle the dreaded “Publish or Perish” mindset that academia is based on and how this leads to lower quality research and is a key part of why researchers are leaving.

Overworked: Always under pressure

Being overworked is probably also a factor for Azerty. Academia does have benefits over industry, you get a lot of freedom to do your own research (provided you can get funding), you are your own boss and can work reasonably flexibly. You can set up collaborations and do as you please without a direct line manager or board of directors. However, in reality these benefits are not so tangible. The freedom is down to which funding you can get, that funding might be short term and unstable, and while you may be your own boss, there is often extra administrative work you need to do as the freedom promised is more like an absent, unsupportive attitude from your employer.

In theory, science is a meritocracy. If you collaborate well and contribute a lot to your field, then you will continue and get a permanent position. In academia there are two things that make you stand out for progressing your career, prestigious papers and prestigious grants. So, the incentive is you are expected to be a publication machine to get the grants, do get more papers in an endless positive feedback loop. As you can see, this has drifted significantly from what researchers are motivated by, learning, experimenting, being curious and making an impact.

It’s this “publish or perish” mindset that academia seems to live by. If you publish frequently in the high impact journals and score good on the metrics you are a paragon, shining hero. If you don’t publish enough, then you are cast out of the ivory tower and onto the streets. This is by no means a new idea, the term “publish or perish” was coined in 1942 and has even inspired a humorous and satirical card game with the same name about having to publish, whatever the cost or the quality of the actual science presented.

Researchers are judged by their publications, grants and awards above everything else. It’s often the first thing they are required to show on a job or promotion application as explained in this video. Scientists are expected to pump out good publication metrics and it’s much easier to condense a researcher down to a number like an impact factor or H Index. In most cases, promotion and recognition come down to the traditional hard metrics like impact factors and H index.

Overall, the publish or perish mindset is very selective in what it rewards, and it selects for a specific type of researcher:

What “publish or perish” wants:

• Prestigious publications in prestigious journals            
• Big grants
• Fancy titles
• Strong publication metrics (impact factor, h-Index)

What “publish or perish” doesn’t take into consideration

• Being a supportive colleague
• Doing good, thorough peer review
• Going the extra mile for teaching
• Helping with committees and departmental organisation
• Taking the time to train PhD students and Postdocs
• Being a good mentor
• Helping with public engagement and outreach programs
• The actual content of your publications

Even if you balance all this and have steady grants it still means you rarely get proper financial security beyond 3-4 years. So, when it comes to hiring people and planning research, there is always an element of risk. Doing ambitious, high impact projects that makes giant leaps is contextualised as a big risk. If your research doesn’t give you “good” “publishable” data, then it is a failure and a waste of your time and money. This grant money is not like a bank account where you spend as you go, there is a complex set of rules that govern what you can spend money on depending on the funding body which you need to navigate. Of course, about 20-30% will be deducted as overhead and go to your institute. Moreover, when it comes to grant applications, you want to boast that you will make a monumental impact, where what you can actually contribute with these resources is less impressive.

This selection pressure has lots of negative consequences. Encouraging people to work more and more and making it the norm. Working far too many hours, a lack of ingenuity, indifference towards bullying or harassment. Pushing people to the limit to jut get the papers out earlier.

There are also ingenious, sneaky tricks to boost your citation metrics and game the system:

1. Make 20 different twitter accounts and sharing your own paper to boost your own metrics citations (based anecdotally)
2.  Excessive, unnecessary self-citation or agreeing to cite other’s papers unnecessary (also called citations rings or citation mafias)
3. As a peer reviewer, insisting that others cite one of your papers during peer review for personal gain.
4. Putting in references in the bibliography of a paper when they are completely irrelevant as this humorous example shows.
5. What about authorship? Instead of doing the hard work to be an author, it’s much more efficient to get authorships with minimal work. These can be quid pro quo situations, or perhaps by putting a big, influential name on a paper it has a higher chance of being accepted by a journal even if they contributed almost nothing. It doesn’t help that being the 1^st author has far more value than any other author.
6. Salami slicing a large project into 3 smaller papers instead of one larger one. Three papers shows that you are “more productive” and may get more citations that one larger one.

Moreover this obsession with authorships and prestige doesn’t fit well with large scale, multinational projects that have many authors. Even with authorships guidelines, it become difficult to judge who really contributed. Then there are implications for reproducibility of papers such as data fabrication and falsification. There are constantly questions raised about papers and retractions. Sometimes from the journal and the peer review process but often from a small number of science integrity investigators and specialists such as these.

So by viewing things in just this way, we completely change the definition of a good scientist. It’s more about playing the system than doing curious, ambitious science. Because of this, researchers have seen a decline of groundbreaking, disruptive papers and a general lack of enthusiasm and creativity. Your great idea is “just another paper I need to stay in my job”. Instead of “an impactful piece of work that was a labour of love from the team that created it over many years”.

But researchers have almost no choice but to game the system and always think about their metrics and output. Otherwise they will not be able to progress in their career or risk losing their funding and job.

Who benefits from publish or perish?

It’s worth looking deeper at who benefits from this “publish or perish” mindset before we move on since it is such an engrained part of the research ecosystem.

One straightforward answer is the publishers. The most competitive journals are for-profit companies with big profit margins who can charge exorbitant fees and have little motivation to do good peer review. Even when they have to make a high-profile retraction of their paper, it doesn’t significantly change their profit margin or reputation. This is good news for publishers. Academics must publish in prestigious journals to maintain their job so there is always a supply. Genius

Researchers work hard and submit manuscripts to the journal in the exact format they desire, this is then peer reviewed by other researchers for free, then researchers have to pay large fees for publishing and/or open access fees. Then when its published, the journals charge another fee (either through institute subscriptions or pay per view) to access their own work. At every stage, the publishers benefit, and the researchers do all the work. As a result there are many legal and some legally questionable ways to dodge these paywalls (See here for more discussion).But how did it end up this way? Well the origins can be traced back to 1955 and Robert Maxwell’s takeover of Pergamon press which laid the groundwork for academic publishers . Many researchers since them have complained that journals dictate what is researched and are the gatekeepers in the research ecosystem and that the academic publishing system works in a way that is fundamentally different from any other industry. It is downright predatory, greedy, and a scam. The publishers also resist against any sort of movement towards open access such as Plan S, which threatens their business model and stops research being accessible to the public.

This demand to always publish fundamentally changes how you plan a scientific project. Usually, you start with hypothesis to fulfil a knowledge gap in a field, and then a research project plan then culminating in some sort of manuscript or other way to disseminate your information. Ultimately you are planning on improving the human understanding of the world in a small way. Perhaps you will make a great discovery, perhaps you will make a small but important step in a field, or you will get a negative result… or something bizarre and unexpected. Whatever you do, it is good science and should be disseminated to the research community and the public either as a dataset, conference, publications, preprint or another way. Publish or perish flips things around so that from the start even before you have the question in mind, you to publish. The consequence is that you must make a convincing story from your data to guarantee that it will be accepted in a good journal. The incentive is to so less ambitious research with less risks that makes a small contribution and guarantees a publication, instead of ambitious, novel research that makes big steps in understanding and are more unpredictable. Instead of “I want to understand how the world works” it is “I must find data to fit my model at whatever cost”. Quantity over Quality. Salami slicing instead of big, memorable chunks of salami.

At the heart of this is the journals set the benchmark for what is “good” and “bad” science. They are very unlikely to publish null results or negative results. There are also editorial biases at play.

There is essentially no regulation for academic journals, and they can decide to get rid of peer review entirely. As a case study look at the publisher Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). This was a reputable peer reviewed journal, until recently where in a bid to have faster processing times, they have essentially watered down the peer review process. Even predatory journals openly exist, these are journals that have little or no peer review and charge extremely high costs to publish. Its down to individual researchers and institutes to inform each other.

Some cases of unbelievably poor peer review have hit social media recently with obviously AI generated papers and images. This highlights how rushed or non-existent peer review can be. Peer review is a critical part of the scientific process. Yes, it takes time and can be a frustrating process, but it’s the bedrock that allows for reproducible science without individual bias. However, in the current climate it feels like a chore and a thankless task for scientist. Often rushed or offloaded to junior members since it is more unpaid work that researchers are expected to do. There is also a concerning rise of predatory journals and services where you can buy authorships. Which completely undermine academic integrity

All of this has other consequences. There is a reproducibility problem with science, and in fact, there are so many papers that it is difficult to find the important ones. Not quite a needle in a haystack but perhaps spotting a black cat in a coal mine.

However, it’s not just the journals that benefit from this. In a way it’s also the universities and other research institutes and the way they are judged that influence this. Research institutes need to show that they publish so they can receive government funding. The best way to prove this is papers with good metrics and grants won in audits like the UKs Research Excellence Framework (REF) and similar audits in other countries. Ultimately its far more convenient to reduce researchers and whole institutes to raw numbers to reflect publication metrics and grant money. So this self-perpetuating cycle doesn’t really have any opposition. Universities value researchers that can boost their research output and metrics above all else. In turn governments value institutes that have high research output and metrics. This burden eventually falls down to the PhDs and Postdocs doing the bulk of the research.

The Prestige Economy

Prestige is everywhere. There is good reason for this and it’s impossible to not consider brand recognition. Perhaps Azerty wasn’t valued for who they are and the work they do, but rather the institute they work at the perceived prestige of their co-authors and employer. However researchers feel that science has become a prestige economy instead of a meritocracy. Instead, it’s about getting close to prestigious names and publishing in the prestigious journals and meeting the prestigious professors that work in the prestigious institutes and get the prestigious grants so that you can become prestigious yourself.

It is about promoting yourself and showing off more than your research and discoveries. In fact, I would argue it’s not the contents of your publications that matter, it’s the journal it’s published in, the authors on the paper and the publication metrics it gains that matter. It’s not how you conduct your day-to-day job and the teaching and training you do that counts, rather it’s the titles, committees you sit in and other affiliations that count. Researchers are constantly balancing doing things that matter and keeping their prestige and swag high enough to be recognised. Of course this detracts from the process of doing research.

Overburdened: Too many extra tasks

Perhaps it wasn’t the publish or perish itself, but the burden of extra non research tasks that took their toll on Azerty and took up valuable time.

Research is not just about the people doing the research directly (Research assistants, PhDs, Postdocs and Group leaders). There is a whole team of people supporting them such as lab managers, technicians, research managers, head of department, human resources, purchasing units, administration, building maintenance, finance teams, strategic planning etc. All these supportive roles should be celebrated as a profession in their own right. However, institutes vary on how much responsibility they take on financially for these supportive roles. In reality it’s the researchers that are expected to support themselves. You need to deal with the following challenges that are not directly about the research. E.g. expensive equipment breaking, long hiring process, difficult grant applications, various committees in the department, organising conferences/seminars/symposia, organising other social events, dealing with larger political issues between the department higher institute management etc. These are unquestionably important for research and allows for a supportive work environment that shields researchers from outside influences. However by placing responsibility onto the researchers it leads them to being hired for one skill set, then expected to do that, plus lots of work they are not specialised in. Just because someone is a professor, it does not mean they are automatically good managers and leaders.

I want to stress that many people (me included) enjoy being part of these other roles, I especially have enjoyed being part of different committees. My issue is that it has become an expectation that researchers do these tasks with little or no compensation and that we passively accept extra tasks that distract from research. It’s far more efficient if a more qualified and specialised member of staff does them. Read here for a more specific discussion on how scientists are unsupported and poorly managed. This is where researchers need to advocate for themselves and ensure that these tasks are completed by efficient support staff.

Teaching is a vitally important function of academics and should not be viewed as a chore. Teaching is one issue that is approached differently according to the institute and. In some places, teaching is mandatory alongside research. In some other places and especially publicly funded research institutes there is no undergraduate teaching. This is also highly personal; some researchers would prefer doing 100% research and some may welcome the opportunity to teach and have a combination. Whatever the system, you should not be forced into doing something you don’t want. I certainly had lecturers who viewed lecturing as a chore.

All this leads to disgruntled researchers who don’t feel supported and must spread out their time across many things. It’s unhelpful that some institutes are run in a more casual way with a lack of accountability and unclear responsibilities. While this is not always clear from the outside this sometimes becomes immediately apparent such as the recent freezer malfunction in KI over Christmas 2023 which exposed this lack of support for research infrastructure.

What scientists want to do:

• Plan experiments
• Meet with their team and interpret data
• Read papers and bounce around ideas with colleagues
• Troubleshoot when things don’t look as expected
• Prepare for conferences
• Teaching (amount will vary)
• Thorough Peer review
• Write papers
• Analyse data
• Data collection
• Supervise and train researchers

What they are additionally expected to do

• Write long complex grants (high chance of them being rejected)
• Ethics applications
• Dealing with ordering and purchasing reagens
• Contribute to committees within a department
• Department administration
• Organising conferences/symposium/seminars
• Marking exams
• Dealing with broken equipment
• Go through the bureaucracy to hire people

How do we improve all this?

Clearly there are lots of challenges and moving parts to why researchers are leaving academia. In the final section I will suggest how we can tackle these challenges and make the academic environment more supportive and sustainable.