Publish and try not to perish in the process

If you are reading this, you have definitely heard of “Publish or Perish” culture. With the advent of predatory journals and journal hijacking scams, this saying has been modified to “Publish high-impact or Perish” in the last decade.

There came a point in my career, around the fourth year of my postdoc, when a PI (whom I respect profoundly) told me that I needed a paper. 

“Any paper.” 

This happened following an excruciating, 12-month long process of review-revise back and forth with a very reputable journal that ended in rejection. I panicked and divided my findings into two: a small paper (“s”) and a bigger (“B”) paper. Completely different findings, obviously. After submission to two different journals (with different impact factors), paper “s” got accepted surprisingly fast. Paper “B” got good reviews and the revision took a bit longer. Right before acceptance, the editor decided that the findings in paper “s” were “decreasing the novelty” of paper “B”, and offered to publish it in the sister journal (-5 impact factor).

So, I basically shot myself in the foot trying to get a paper. Any paper.

Would things have been different if there was no pressure to publish? Well, I would not have sent my manuscript to the very reputable journal in the first place, which would have saved me at least 12-months.

But more generally, what else would be different in the academic system if there was no pressure to publish? Maybe the publication frequency would go down globally. With the increasing load in published papers, that might be a good thing. Especially since most published research is not reproducible.

Is it fair to expect the same frequency of publications in “slow-burn” areas versus rapidly evolving fields? There is a risk that premature and fragmentary publications could delay potentially groundbreaking research. 

With time spent calculating citation indices, grant application requirements, tenure-track ranking systems and other “strange” performance evaluation metrics, scientists are left with reduced space for deep, transformative thinking. We must value long-term, complex research projects and recognize that there are various research timelines with differing methodologies.

Is there any room left for genuine scientific exploration? 

Or does everyone just need ✨a paper✨?