Perils of publish or perish
The
is assessed by a number of factors including After all, Doctor is Latin for teacher.
The spread and sustenance of knowledge through the written word is the reason why many academics consider publishing research papers as the bread and butter of academia, therefore leading to the publish or perish conundrum.
For more than 1,000 years, we have gathered our collective knowledge into the minds of individuals and a vast library of literature. It is therefore quite understandable why such importance is given to publication.
In recent times, it was deemed necessary to quantify the performance of universities for various reasons. Since publications are of central importance to universities, the number of papers academics published became a measure of quality.
Of course, the number of papers published alone would be a rather simplistic measure since it did not consider the importance of the papers published.
As a result of that, other measures such as Impact Factors and H-index were introduced. These factored in the number of citations a published article received — the more citations denoted a more important paper, and more important papers resulted in a higher H-index; and the number of citations
for a specific journal — the more times a journal is cited, the more important it is and therefore a higher impact factor.
This is all well, until the use of numbers becomes a means to gauge the quality of academic staff and the university in general. Then, it perhaps evolves into a new problem. In some cases, the numbers set as targets are high in order to reach lofty goals.
Being ambitious is not a crime nor is it a bad thing. Unfortunately, the pressure to publish has led to rather unsavoury news of fraud in academia that we hear about in the news (locally as well as overseas).
Students, who are under pressure to publish, begin to cut corners and even falsify data to attain the level that will allow them to graduate with master’s or postgraduate degrees. Lecturers are pushed towards publishing numerous papers a year to meet those same performance criteria.
This is not all bad. But we should also worry about whether the deluge of papers, many of which will probably be unread or glanced at merely for the sake of citing a previous work, is the way forward for the sustenance of human knowledge. Are we beginning to pollute and corrupt our collective knowledge with junk? We have all probably experienced a situation where we get over-ambitious and tax our computers with too much processing loads and slowing them down. Are we doing the same to ourselves as a civilisation? Are we unintentionally slowing down our quest to solve humanity’s problems of sustaining our planet for future generations, ending famines and curing diseases?
While publications remain important, quality should also be emphasised. Recent studies have shown that the sole use of quantitative indicators for research evaluation has had adverse effects. There have been recommendations to contextualise research performance as a complex ecosystem that take into consideration the diversity of the scholars and their abilities as well as their relationships (collaborations and interdisciplinary research). Take for example a medical colleague who makes a great effort to teaching and spreading the latest techniques to medical practitioners in other hospitals.
This fits the bill for the sustenance of knowledge but it probably cannot be written up as a research article. However, such work can be recorded as white papers, manuals and books that will be just as important, perhaps even more so in Malaysia.
Universities have become assets to our civilisation, even more so in the Malaysian context where solutions to specific local problems or issues of national interest can be championed by local universities. So publish and evolve we must. But we must also not jeopardise the core ideals of a university as the custodian of knowledge in our drive for success.