And here\u2019s the problem. Based on my own observations, I believe that at more senior stages, a different phenomenon than \u201cPublish or Perish\u201d emerges. For the sake of this post, I\u2019ll call it\u00a0\u201cPublish or Stall.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0What I\u2019ve 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\u2014an 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This issue creates real frustration for early-career researchers, who are still very much bound by the \u201cPublish or Perish\u201d principle. It\u2019s not uncommon for them to\u00a0wait<\/strong>\u00a0months<\/strong>\u00a0to<\/strong>\u00a0get<\/strong>\u00a0feedback<\/strong>\u00a0on<\/strong>\u00a0manuscript<\/strong>\u00a0drafts<\/strong>. Typically, there are multiple rounds of revisions before a paper is finally submitted. Ironically, if the PI\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s another layer to this problem, which I\u2019ve seen many times: when early-career researchers leave their institutions before finishing their manuscripts, their work often never gets published at all\u2014especially 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\u2019s no one to push for publication, and the\u00a0paper<\/strong>\u00a0draft<\/strong>\u00a0ends<\/strong>\u00a0up<\/strong>\u00a0in<\/strong>\u00a0a<\/strong>\u00a0drawer<\/strong>. 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 \u201cnegative findings\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You may be thinking,\u00a0This doesn\u2019t make sense\u2014senior researchers need papers to be competitive for grants, too.<\/em>\u00a0This 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\u2019s a tendency to\u00a0focus<\/strong>\u00a0on<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cexciting<\/strong>\u201d\u00a0results<\/strong>\u00a0and aim for \u201ctop journals.\u201d Sometimes, this strategy works, compensating for many unpublished pieces of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, how do we break this cycle? It\u2019s 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\u00a0funding<\/strong>\u00a0lotteries<\/strong>\u00a0could 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\u00a0hiring<\/strong>\u00a0more<\/strong>\u00a0PIs<\/strong>\u00a0with smaller groups to lead.\u00a0Research<\/strong>\u00a0evaluation<\/strong>\u00a0reforms<\/strong>\u00a0are already working to shift away from traditional evaluation criteria, incorporating factors such as supervision quality and Open Science activities.\u00a0Open Science<\/strong>\u00a0provides practical tools to help early-career researchers showcase their work without having to rely on \u201ctop journals.\u201d Publishing research protocols, software, and data not only increases the visibility of their work but also helps ensure that research doesn\u2019t disappear when someone leaves the group, making it easier for others to pick up the work and complete the publication process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In summary, while the \u201cPublish or Perish\u201d 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introducing the \u201cPublish or Stall\u201d Phenomenon We\u2019ve all heard of\u00a0“Publish or Perish”\u2014the mantra that reminds us how important it is to consistently publish our work in \u201cimpactful\u201d journals. If you don\u2019t, your CV may not attract funders or employers, and you risk being pushed out of the academic system. This certainly happens to many researchers. […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilonalipp.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
We\u2019ve all heard of\u00a0“Publish or Perish”<\/strong>\u2014the mantra that reminds us how important it is to consistently publish our work in \u201cimpactful\u201d journals. If you don\u2019t, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n