“Publish or Perish" is a Huge Problem – But Not Publishing is Too

Introducing the “Publish or Stall” Phenomenon

September 6, 2024

We’ve all heard of "Publish or Perish"—the mantra that reminds us how important it is to consistently publish our work in “impactful” journals. If you don’t, your CV may not attract funders or employers, and you risk being pushed out of the academic system. This certainly happens to many researchers. However, I would argue that the most affected by this are early-career researchers.

And here’s the problem. Based on my own observations, I believe that at more senior stages, a different phenomenon than “Publish or Perish” emerges. For the sake of this post, I’ll call it “Publish or Stall.” What I’ve seen many times is that the pressure to publish in a timely manner seems to fade as careers progress. What becomes more important is securing grants—an absolute necessity to keep research groups running and staff employed. Since a day only has 24 hours, and senior researchers are often overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities, they must prioritize their limited "flexible time" and securing funding may be the #1 priority.

This issue creates real frustration for early-career researchers, who are still very much bound by the “Publish or Perish” principle. It’s not uncommon for them to wait months to get feedback on manuscript drafts. Typically, there are multiple rounds of revisions before a paper is finally submitted. Ironically, if the PI’s grant applications are successful, more early-career researchers may join the group, leading to more manuscripts to review, and the vicious cycle continues. Of course, there are probably many other reasons than grant writing for why PIs stall giving feedback on manuscripts and I am curious to see more systematic investigative approaches to this.

There’s another layer to this problem, which I’ve seen many times: when early-career researchers leave their institutions before finishing their manuscripts, their work often never gets published at all—especially when they transition outside of academia. Which is inevitable, as there are not enough jobs within academia to go around. Once the person responsible for the manuscript is gone, there’s no one to push for publication, and the paper draft ends up in a drawer. Of course the long publishing process, even beyond the delays caused by internal feedback, does not help here. While the phenomenon of work ending up in a drawer is often associated with “negative findings” that no journal wants to publish, I have also seen it happen with interesting results. Contributing to this issue are poor documentation, data management, and script organization, which make it difficult to finish incomplete manuscripts after researchers leave, even if someone else wanted to take over.

You may be thinking, This doesn’t make sense—senior researchers need papers to be competitive for grants, too. This is true. However, very established researchers with large research groups still manage to publish a decent number of papers, even when the publication of individual researchers' work is significantly delayed. I also hypothesize that, given their limited time to devote to papers, there’s a tendency to focus on “exciting” results and aim for “top journals.” Sometimes, this strategy works, compensating for many unpublished pieces of work.

So, how do we break this cycle? It’s no secret that senior academics have too many responsibilities and must constantly juggle and prioritize. The funding system is often criticized, and some argue that funding lotteries could help reduce the time wasted on grant writing. Another potential solution is ensuring that individual PIs do not have responsibility for too many staff members, instead hiring more PIs with smaller groups to lead. Research evaluation reforms are already working to shift away from traditional evaluation criteria, incorporating factors such as supervision quality and Open Science activities. Open Science provides practical tools to help early-career researchers showcase their work without having to rely on “top journals.” Publishing research protocols, software, and data not only increases the visibility of their work but also helps ensure that research doesn’t disappear when someone leaves the group, making it easier for others to pick up the work and complete the publication process.

In summary, while the “Publish or Perish” phenomenon is often criticized for encouraging the publication of poor-quality articles, bad scientific practices, and paper mills, I argue that stalling or hindering the publication of good work is also a significant problem. From my experience, this happens frequently and often at the expense of early-career researchers.