){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
This trend in academia is one of the biggest causes of faculty burnout and career abandonment.
The main task of an educator is to generate and transmit knowledge. Depending on what stage of your career you are in and what specialization you seek, publishing research or studies are the cornerstone.
Those engaged in research and production must stay relevant by producing new material with accurate and high-impact results to generate and keep the interest of the institution funding them. This is the foundation of the publish or perish culture.
What comprises this phenomenon?
Publish or perish refers to the constant pressure on academicians to conduct and publish research and studies, especially in universities where research is the hub for attracting funds. Academicians are employed and remunerated in proportion to their research.
The most common measure accrediting a researcher is the number of publications. It counts as the primary value when hiring and deciding whether an academician will establish or continue a research career, be accommodated in a teaching or administrative position, or simply not considered for the job.
This push for constant production could be affecting the quality of the studies performed. Problems have already arisen, such as the replicability crisis, which compromises the verification and validation of thousands of scientific and social sciences experiments.
The economic cost of maintaining this pace of publications in the governmental and educational spheres is high. Adding to this, the detrimental effect that a non-stop publishing environment has on those who do the work cannot be underestimated. Discouragment and abandonment of academic careers are strongly correlated to the imposition of constant production and the risk of losing a job if the quota is not met. How do we size the personal cost of a publish or perish culture?
How does it affect the producers of knowledge?
The impact of the collective mindset of “publish or perish” is chronic burnout in the academic community and one of the main reasons why academicians end up cutting short their careers.
Speaking of how it affects the academic community as a whole, the pervasive culture of “publish or perish” has tempted researchers to engage in practices that compromise academic work quality.
Some of these harmful activities include divide research results into several articles rather than one that would be complete and cohesive. Jumping into someone else’s project to get a co-authorship if not having a project of their own.
Falling into confirmation bias by seeking only sources that favor the process that obtains the expected results.
Examples such as these raise serious ethical concerns, and the need for a serious conversation about the integrity of the research work carried out in these circumstances becomes apparent.
This mindset has also seriously affected a sector of the academic community during the pandemic’s prolonged contingency: the women researchers.
In previous articles, we have written about the disproportionate share of family and domestic care burdens that professional women have and the associated workforce exodus that has cost millions of jobs worldwide. In a work culture where if you do not publish, you do not exist, women in academia are profoundly impacted by these mass production trends. Research and papers conducted and published by women have systematically disappeared since the beginning of the confinements last year.
Do you think a change of mindset is needed to keep academicians from leaving the profession? Or to safeguard the quality and identity of academic work?
What has your experience been in this publishing environment? Tell us in the comments.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
)