“Publish-or-Perish” – is a term familiar to all scientists or researchers.
My thanks go to Oleg Ruchayskiy and Zuszana Kirchhakova. Their insightful LinkedIn Posts sparked my curiosity. I instantly felt the urge to provide this fresh overview of the situation.
This is neither a policy paper nor does it provide answers. It is a subjective collection of my findings as a consultant for leading scientists, quotes from scientists we work with and research on the World Wide Web.
And this is a reminder that research leaders can do their bit to induce change. And they probably should:
Be a leading scientist who knows how to lead.
1. The ambivalent relation to the publication measure
My client is a director of a middle-size research centre. Two decades of research lie behind him. We are standing in his office. The furniture are for sure 20 years old, papers, magazines and lab equipment on all available surfaces. The shelves carry impressive see books. The conversation continues. He says: “I profoundly dislike relying on these idiotic paper counts.” Strong words. Clear position.
And then, a split of second later, he shares their Nature paper that just got accepted. Stars in his eyes. How happy he is for his PostDoc. How good it is for her career. And his reputation. He told me everything – about the reviewing process, the time it took, the hard work. I doubt he was aware of the contradiction.
I didn’t point it out and missed a good opportunity for a deeper conversation.
Most researchers live this tension every day.
They know the system is flawed. And they play by its rules as years go by. A postdoc put it differently: “I need this Nature paper for my career. Afterwards, I’m free to publish in journals more suitable for my topic.” She wasn’t cynical. She wanted to stay in research, had understood the rules and decided to play by them first. Change the game later.
But will “later” ever come?
This is the question I want to explore with you. To be clear: this is not an argument against publishing. Publishing is how science communicates. How knowledge travels. How innovation finds its way. My question is a different one – and it matters especially if you lead a research group, a department, let alone an institution:
What happens when publication count becomes the dominant measure of scientific worth? And what can you, as a leader, do about it?
I don’t have all the answers. I regard myself as a facilitator of a debate. What I do bring is a perspective of years of working with science leaders – and the belief that the people closest to the problem have the leverage for change. Your team watches how you define success. That starts long before any paper is submitted.
2. What “publish-or-perish” costs – and who pays the price
“Today, I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that.” That’s what Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs told The Guardian in 2013. The physicist predicted a new particle in a publication in 1964, and only published a few papers afterwards. By today’s metrics, he would not be regarded as productive enough. What does that tell us about a system that counts papers instead of weighing ideas?
Higgs is not the only prominent scientist who questioned this logic. Albert Einstein warned early on: “An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality.” That warning is decades old, but the system it describes is still in place. What does this pressure produce in practice?
Early career researchers feel it most.
They chase metrics like the h-index because their promotion or the next grant depends on it. They are prone to “publisher pleasing”, convenience research, often incremental – not towards the kind of unconventional work that might take years before it yields a single paper. The bold questions get postponed. The risky experiments may not happen.
And the consequences go further.
In 2023 alone, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted from academic journals. Roughly twenty journals closed after being flooded with fake research from paper mills. A 2016 Nature survey found that over 70 percent of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce a colleague’s results. More than half couldn’t reproduce their own. These are not isolated incidents. These are symptoms.
When researchers are measured primarily on volume, some will cut corners. Some will split one study into three papers – a practice known as “salami slicing.” Some hyper-prolific authors have published up to five articles a day. Journals have responded by defining a “least publishable unit” – the smallest amount of science that still counts as a paper.
Read that again: The smallest amount of science that still counts as publishable.
This is Taylorism at its best! Researchers in a mass paper production factory. Stripped of passion and curiosity. Not what most researchers entered science to do. And it is not what society needs from its research system. The challenges we face – climate, health, energy, food security – require deep, sustained, sometimes uncomfortable enquiry. We cannot afford to have top talent spend their energy on incremental outputs that primarily serve a metric.
The question for scientific leaders: if your early-career researchers are optimising for publication count rather than for the questions that matter most – is that their choice? Or is it the environment you are sustaining?
3. The inertia trap: why the system resists change
The problems are well understood. Why is the change slow? Habits die hard because change requires extra energy. And, most importantly, the actors need a plan for what to replace Publish or Perish with.
Senior scientists built their careers under the current rules. They published, they were rewarded, they got tenure. Why challenge a success model that worked for them? Questioning the very mechanism that validated their work would inevitably question their career path. When a senior professor advises a young researcher to “just keep writing papers,” both benefit from the authorship.
Early-career researchers feel the pressure more directly.
But they can’t afford to be the ones who challenge the rules – because the colleague who plays by them will be shortlisted instead. You don’t reform a system by being eliminated from it.
Now, the publishing houses.
Academic publishing is a cash cow like no other. The business model combines state funds with highly skilled volunteers. Publishers get intellectual property for free and charge the originator for its distribution. The business model depends on volume. There is very little financial incentive to encourage researchers to publish less.
At the bottom of the food chain: Postdocs and PhD-students, followed by Group Leaders and their directors.
According to a 2025 study by Cambridge University Press, only one-third of researchers, publishers, funders and librarians believe the current reward system works well. But the cost of going first feels higher than the cost of waiting. Whoever spearheads reform, might lose.
The result is an unproductive pointing-fingers-at game. Funders point to institutions. Institutions point to evaluation committees. Committees point to established metrics. Researchers point to the rules they didn’t write. The publishers win.
Breaking the status quo requires leaders with enough standing to absorb the risk of doing things differently. Not a postdoc fighting for her first contract. Not a PhD student trying to survive.
Change requires leaders who see the big picture. That is, to understand the dependencies and to look for the leverage in their own kingdom. Research needs leaders who are willing to say: I treat my PhDs and Postdocs as humans beings, and I do my part to nurture their creativity for science not for the metrics.
That’s not a comfortable position. It is a leadership position.
4. Reform is no longer a niche idea
There is no shortage of initiatives calling for change. Since 2012 nearly 27,000 individuals and organizations in 171 countries have signed The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment – known as DORA. DORA’s core message: stop using journal-based metrics as the only proxy for the quality of individual research. Evaluate researchers on what they actually contribute.
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment – CoARA – was founded in 2022 with a similar ambition. Its agreement asks institutions to move away from narrow bibliometric indicators and to value diverse contributions: teaching, mentoring, open science, societal impact. Assessment should be more qualitative, more peer-review-based, more honest about what good research actually involves.
The European Research Council (ERC) signed DORA and the “Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment” for the 2024 funding period. The ERC writes: “we wanted […] evaluation panels to see – a more holistic and fuller account of their research careers and contributions”.
And in 2025, Cambridge University Press published a report based on a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, publishers, funders and librarians across 120 countries. The findings mirror the dissatisfaction. Only 32 percent believe the current system is in a good position to meet future challenges. 64 percent said the system fails to recognise contributions outside publishing articles in established journals. Many respondents want a system that rewards the full range of research work – including peer review and mentoring.
Mandy Hill, managing director at Cambridge University Press, is quoted in an article about the study in Inside Higher Ed: “if researchers were measured on the quality of their work rather than volume and journal prestige, many of the current problems would not exist.”
DORA’s then co-chair Ginny Barbour called research assessment reform “essential for the future of academic publishing”.
From my perspective the declarations and agreements raise a number of questions:
- How exactly is the “holistic” view on researchers’ contribution composed?
- Does any of this concern the group leader who sits in a hiring committee next Tuesday?
- Does it change how a Postdoc’s performance review is conducted this quarter?
CoARA itself states that progress is slow. Who does the first step? Do you change daily practice? Do you want to?
We are social animals. Safety lies in numbers. You are not the only leader having a hard time with this decision. Change happens locally – in departments, in evaluation meetings, in the conversations you have with your team about what counts and what doesn’t.
Maybe you have signed DORA or joined CoARA. What has changed in practice since then? What else can you do?
These are not rhetorical questions. These are leadership questions.
5. The brain drain
When I ask passionate researchers why they leave academia, I usually sense sadness between the lines. I get answers such as: “my sacrifices are no guarantee for a job”, or “I’m a caretaker and I won a grant but had to turn it down because part-time is not allowed”, or “if I want to stay in academia, there is only a way up. I can’t just keep doing what I love – science”.
Surveys across Europe and North America paint a consistent picture. A significant share of doctoral researchers – depending on the study, between 50 and 75 percent – consider leaving academia at some point during their career. The reasons they give are remarkably similar: lack of job security, excessive pressure to publish, limited recognition for work that falls outside the publication count, and a culture that rewards individual output over collaborative progress.
In line with my own experience, these are not people who lack ambition. Many of them are among the most capable researchers of their generation. They leave still passionate about science but the system made it too costly to stay.
For research institutions, this is a talent problem. For society, it is bigger than that.
The challenges we face – from climate adaptation to pandemic preparedness to the ethical governance of artificial intelligence – depend on sustained, high-quality research. Every researcher who leaves because the incentive system failed them is a loss that cannot be measured in publications.
And here is what makes this a leadership topic: the decision to leave rarely happens overnight. It builds over months, sometimes years. It builds in moments when a researcher realizes that her mentoring work will not count in the next evaluation. When a group leader doesn’t get leadership training. When a postdoc understands that the safest career strategy is to produce volume – and falls prey to journals with questionable reputation.
By the time someone hands in their resignation, the opportunity to change their mind has long passed.
The question for leaders is not how to stop people from leaving. It is how to build an environment that acknowledges that researchers are humans living lives outside the lab. As caretakers, as parents, as people with hobbies that fuel their research.
What can you change in your group, your department, your institution, so that your best people stay?
6. What leaders can actually influence
From my years with international research organizations, I know that most leaders see what is wrong with the current system – but feel stuck when it comes to their own room for manoeuvre.
My article is not a policy proposal. But I do hope, the following may inspire you to actions that are already within your reach.
Problem: the gap between values and practice
Most research leaders I work with do not believe that publication count is the best measure of scientific quality. Yet, their evaluation processes, their hiring criteria, and their daily feedback to team members often fall back to that metric. Out of habit – and because change requires extra energy.
Your team measures you on what you do, not on what you say. Make your criteria explicit.
The single most effective thing a research leader can do is to name – clearly, in writing – what counts in their group beyond publications.
Three questions worth sitting with:
- When did you last promote, praise, or highlight a contribution that was not a publication? Think of mentoring, peer review, public engagement, methodological innovation, training of junior staff.
- Do your evaluation criteria reflect what you actually value – or do you count publications because it is easy?
- If a talented postdoc in your group decided to pursue a risky, long-term research question instead of producing three safe papers this year – would you give them green light? Why or why not?
Be honest with yourself. Open up to your peers, they face the same challenges.
Action: 3 steps you can take this quarter
- Name what counts. Have an explicit conversation with your team about what you value beyond publications. Not as a nice-to-have, but as part of how you assess performance. Give them room to reflect and respond.
- Make invisible work visible. Mentoring, peer review, data curation, community building, public engagement – these contributions often disappear in CVs and annual reports. Create a format in your group where they are documented and acknowledged. A simple shared list can be a start.
- Use your voice in committees. The next time you sit in a hiring or evaluation committee, watch out for the candidate’s personality that may come through in a side hustle they mentioned or their love for science communication. You may not change the outcome every time. But you shift the conversation. And conversations shape norms.
None of these steps require institutional reform. They require a decision – yours.
And if you are unsure where to start: pick the one action from the list above that made you most uncomfortable. That is probably where the work begins.
Leadership in science stands at the intersection of excellence and empathy, of evidence and vision. It requires more than managing resources or achieving results; it calls for guiding people with purpose and authenticity. The best scientific leaders do not choose between research and management — they integrate both to serve the greater goal of discovery and progress. When leadership and science reinforce one another, both knowledge and humanity advance.
7. Your move: from debate to decision
Publish or Perish was born in a very different era and has become big business. The solution from the past has become today’s problem. The system will not reform itself. That much is clear.
Declarations have been signed. Papers on the topic have been published. The evidence is there. And still, daily practice in most institutions looks remarkably similar to how it looked ten years ago.
I don’t believe this is because people don’t care. It is because changing an incentive system requires someone to go first – and going first feels risky when everyone around you is still counting papers.
But here is what I have observed in my work with research leaders across Europe: change does not start with a policy decision from the top. It starts with one leader who decides that the criteria in their group will reflect what they actually value. One honest conversation with a team. One hiring committee where someone asks a different question.
That is not a revolution. It is a leader’s decision.
I didn’t write this post to give you the answer. I wrote it to encourage you to act. The debate around publish or perish is far from over – and it shouldn’t be.
Research is indispensable. Creative minds have improved our standards of living for centuries. Mass production of mediocre papers won’t help solve the many crises humanity is facing.
Over to you: what is one thing you could change in how you evaluate your team – starting this quarter?
Sources
- Higgs, P. (2013). Interview with The Guardian. “Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system - Einstein, A. “An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality.” Quoted via Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9166229 - Sutter, P. M. (2022). “Why Won’t Academia Let Go of ‘Publish or Perish’?” UNDARK
https://undark.org/2022/06/16/why-wont-academia-let-go-of-publish-or-perish/ - Indiana University researchers co-author study challenging ‘publish or perish’ culture, call for overhaul of academic publishing (2025)
https://news.iu.edu/college/live/news/45216-iu-researchers-co-author-study-challenging-publish - The misalignment of incentives in academic publishing and implications for journal reform (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401231121 - “Mid-Career Mass Exodus.” Nature, Vol. 606, 2 June 2022.
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-022-01512-6/d41586-022-01512-6.pdf - Barometer für die Wissenschaft (2020). DZHW.
https://www.wb.dzhw.eu/downloads/wibef_barometer2020.pdf - FirstPrinciples (2024). “Is it time for ‘publish or perish’ to perish?”
https://www.firstprinciples.org/article/is-it-time-for-publish-or-perish-to-perish - Palmer, K. (2025). “Major Academic Press Calls for ‘Publish or Perish’ Reform.” Inside Higher Ed.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/10/22/major-academic-press-calls-publish-or-perish-reform - Cambridge University Press (2025). Report on academic reward and recognition systems. Survey of 3,000+ respondents across 120 countries.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2025/10/22/major-academic-press-calls-publish-or-perish-reform - DORA – San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment.
https://sfdora.org - CoARA – Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment.
https://coara.eu - European Research Council (ERC). “Changes in the evaluation of proposals for ERC grants.” 17 July 2023.
https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/magazine-article/research-assessment-ScC-view
