When I use a word . . . “Publish or perish”: adverse effects

Attitudes to “publish or perish”

I have previously defined the “publish or perish” doctrine as “An aphorism that describes the pressure on an academic to have innovative scholarly material published in reputable journals or other forms of scholarly output, sufficiently often, in order to avoid demotion, dismissal, failure to progress in one’s scholarly career, or diminishing the status or reputation of one’s scholarly community or discipline.”1

I call it a doctrine, which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “That which is taught or laid down as true concerning a particular subject or department of knowledge.”2 The doctrine states that if you do not publish you will perish. Others have attached a range of other words (collocates) to the phrase.3 Some of them are non-judgmental, while others are critical, either moderately or highly so. Examples include: adage, approach, attitude, concept, maxim, phenomenon, and principle (all non-judgmental); arbitrary expectation, dictum, dilemma, mandate, and syndrome (moderately critical); and dragon, imperative, mantra and cliched mantra, mindset, negative phenomenon, and rhetoric (highly critical).

Somewhat to my surprise, the frequencies with which these collocates have been used suggest that as time has gone by, rather than becoming more critical of the “publish or perish” doctrine, those who have been writing about it have seemed more likely to have passively accepted it, more frequently using non-judgmental collocates. In contrast, in a questionnaire study in four academic institutions in Amsterdam there was a negative attitude towards the current publication climate across academic ranks and disciplinary fields; postdocs and assistant professors perceived the greatest publication stress and PhD students perceived a considerable lack of resources to relieve that stress.4 However, these two observations are not contradictory; it is possible for academics to dislike the status quo, while at the same time resigning themselves to the fact that it exists.

I trawled these collocates from a systematic review of papers in which the term “publish or perish” occurred as such or in which the two words were closely associated, over 220 papers in all. I have now searched those papers for the main themes that they highlighted and in particular the harms that they discussed. This is a brief resumé of my findings. A more detailed analysis would be useful.

Harms of “publish or perish”

Some authors have praised what they have suggested are benefits of the “publish or perish” doctrine. Referring to it as “laudable,” the editors of a surgical journal reported that “A good track record of publications brings attention to the author and their institution and allows identification based on merit in this area rather than favouritism. It also motivates surgeons early in their careers, often because publication features on scoring matrices of selection panels or it is well known that interviewers will likely appoint ‘people like us’, rather than a genuine enthusiasm for early career research.”5 However, they also highlighted their concerns about it, including the increasing load of papers they were receiving as journal editors and the increasing difficulty in finding reviewers to scrutinise them. This is a widespread problem. They also pointed to deterioration in the quality of papers being submitted, which in their case had led to a fall in acceptance rate from around 45% to around 20%. And the most serious problem to which they referred was the increase in research misconduct. This reflects the increasing frequency of violations of academic integrity, i.e. matters of academic dishonesty or misdemeanours. These include fabrication or falsification of data, plagiarism, misuse of statistics, concealing the use of AI, withholding information, for example about conflicts of interest, and selective or inaccurate citation.6

The themes that most often emerged from the papers in the systematic review were the increased numbers of papers being published, the increased numbers of authors per paper, and the increased incidence of poor research quality and therefore problems with reproducibility. Research misconduct and questionable practices of all kinds were also frequent themes.

Many of these themes are interconnected.

With pressure to publish naturally comes an increased number of publications. This can be clearly seen in the annual numbers of publications listed in the usual databases, such as PubMed and Medline, Clarivate, and EMBASE. For example, between 1945 and 2000 there was a roughly linear increase in the numbers of papers listed in PubMed each year, from 20 513 in 1945 to 493 674 in 1999; the regression showed a regular increase in the number of publications of 8326 papers per year. After 2000 the rate increased markedly, from 532 623 to 1 734 665 in 2024, with a linear slope of just over 50 000 papers per year, a more than sixfold increase from before. This bimodal distribution is mirrored among the papers in the systematic review, with a point of inflexion at around the year 2000.

This increased rate of publication has been accompanied by an increase in the numbers of co-authors on each paper.7 This may be in part due to a desire to increase the number of authors with publications to their name, and there is evidence that the number of papers per author has not increased during this time.8

This increase in publication has been accompanied by a reduction in the quality of the work being published. This was particularly noticeable during the covid-19 pandemic.910

Reduced research quality has led in part to wasted resources and what is being called a reproducibility crisis.11 Innovation is also being stifled.12 All this has been accompanied by evidence of increased research misconduct 13 and fake papers,14 including the burgeoning of paper mills and predatory journals.15 Retractions of published work have also increased, from 11 to 45 per 100 000 publications in Europe between 2000 and 2020.16

All of this has also taken a toll on academics. There is evidence of increased burnout among senior academics17 and of an increased reluctance on the part of trainees to enter research because of a fear of the stresses involved.18 Students have also suffered, because attention has been diverted from teaching to research.19

Not all of these effects can be blamed entirely on the “publish or perish” doctrine, but it has played a large part.