#PERISH MEME FULL#

These interactions are generally illustrated by a matrix as follows: AĮach gate “opens”, i.e. We can view these inputs as different conditions that can each either be met (1 – true ) or not met (0 – false), and that can furthermore interact in several different ways. Speaking of binary systems… OrĬomputers rely on different types of basic logic gates to establish relationships between two inputs, A and B. The problem with “publish or perish” is that it simplifies things to a fake binary distinction and glosses over the complexities that inhabit each of these three words. Waiting until you feel that you have something important to say is not good advice – no discipline will accept a fundamental theoretical insight from someone who is completely unknown among her peers because she has never published a line of text before.

I am infinitely grateful to those who encouraged me to just start publishing, even when I did not feel I had a legitimate voice within the discipline. This is not to say that publishing is not good advice. In addition, there are countless other variables that publish or perish fails to account for: different disciplines have different sizes, impact factors vary widely from field to field, editors and reviewers are only human and their decisions not always entirely fair or objective, and let me not get started on the politics of co-authorship and the order of authors on a paper and what that paper will then be “worth” on each of their CVs. These papers will be published in the same journal, many authors might not mention “Special Issue” on their CV, and unless someone really takes the time to dig deeper, the impact factor of the journal is now on that author’s CV. In addition, there are ways to get into high-level journals that might otherwise reject your paper, for example by applying for a Special Issue that is guest edited and comes with a pre-selected set of papers on a given theme. Not because the first-tier journals don’t publish quality – most of the time they do – but given the abundance of papers they receive (some journals reject over 95% of submissions), some excellent papers necessarily end up in the rejection pile, simply because they don’t fit with the stated aims of the journal or the preferences and interests of its editors. But let’s be honest, they will not actually read your papers to see whether they are of good quality, they will use the impact factor of the journals you published in as a proxy for quality and that is deeply problematic.

Any prospective employer or funding body will argue that they will above all look at the quality of publications, not their quantity. The way in which academic CVs are usually evaluated frankly does not help.

It also rewards academics for publishing basically anything, and a publication strategy that is based on writing few but very good publications almost looks like an act of resistance. In many fields this has also led to a proliferation of second- and third-tier journals and an abundance of frankly rather mediocre articles. This sounds like not much, ultimately, but it generally boils down to writing one high-level and several lower-level papers, or artificially splitting data sets from a single project into several subsets that can be published in separate papers.

#PERISH MEME FULL#

In many institutions there are formal or less formal publication targets and full time academic staff are expected to produce around 2 to 3 articles a year. After all, a high-quality publication takes time, sometimes years, and you are supposed to be publishing all the time. Let me get the obvious one out of the way first: publish or perish has nothing to say about publication quality and instead seems to emphasize on quantity. In fact, publish or perish is a meme that keeps many researchers stuck in what is inherently an abusive relationship with a system that gives them an illusion of agency that is just good enough to make them hang on. Publish or perish is not in any way an accurate description of academia, nor is it sound advice for academics.

The argument that I will develop in this post is that it is not very good at either. It is a phrase used by journalists and commentators to describe the current state of academia, and also passed on as advice from senior academics to their younger colleagues, and from junior academics to their peers. Publish or perish sounds snappy and rings true, which is why we really need to ask ourselves whether it actually is.

Perish meme