Issue #84
by Michael Seadle (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
On 15 July 2024 Vladimir Moskovkin published an entry on the “LSE Impact blog” entitled “Tracing the origins of ‘publish or perish’”.¹ The same post had appeared earlier on the “Leiden Madtrics blog” under the title “Origin and evolution of the ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon”, which may indicate the level of interest in the topic.² Eugene Garfield questioned the origin of the phrase in 1996, and Moskovkin was not the first person to seek its origin. The author traces the origin back through various iterations to the nineteenth century Swiss art historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote about “veröffentlichen oder untergehen” (“publish or perish”), even though today “... German-language literature exclusively uses the English-language term ‘publish or perish’ when dealing with the above phenomenon.”¹
The phrase was relatively harmless, until “... the moment came when science officials decided to use the impact factor of a journal as a criterion for the career development of a scientist and evaluation of scientific research results, and then the real publication race under the slogan ‘publish or perish’ began.” Moskovkin speculates that this happened when a commercial publisher acquired Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information “... and then the journal impact factor was put at the service of commercial publishers, who began to monopolise the market of scientific periodicals.”1 This led to the rewards systems in universities that became dependent on high impact journals, which then allowed publishers “... to drive up the price of journal subscriptions …” and created an interest in Open Access.¹
The problem is how to disentangle academic rewards from a reliance on publishing in high impact factor journals, which has become a key mechanism for assigning value to articles that university administrators probably do not read or understand. The situation could possibly change if open access publications could compete fairly without article processing charges that not every author can pay. But the fact would remain that administrators are relying on a measure of the number of citations, which is equal to holding a popularity contest to judge value. The best universities rely on the judgment of peers who read the articles to make hiring and promotion judgments.
1: Moskovkin, Vladimir M. “Tracing the Origins of ‘Publish or Perish.’” Impact of Social Sciences (blog), July 15, 2024. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/07/15/tracing-the-origins-of-publish-or-perish/.
2: “Origin and Evolution of the ‘Publish or Perish’ Phenomenon,” June 4, 2024. https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/origin-and-evolution-of-the-publish-or-perish-phenomenon.
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