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Although many in academe have speculated about the effects of pressure to publish on the management discipline – often referred to as “publish or perish” – prevailing knowledge has been based on anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the perceptions of management faculty regarding the pressure to publish imperative.

The authors surveyed faculty in 104 management departments of AACSB accredited, research‐oriented US business schools to explore the prevalence, sources, and effects of pressure to publish.

Results indicate that pressure to publish affects both tenured and tenure‐track management faculty, although the latter, as a group, feel significantly more pressure than those who are tenured. The primary source of this pressure is faculty themselves who are motivated by the prospects of enhancing their professional reputation, leaving a permanent mark on their profession, and increasing their salary and job mobility. The effects of pressure to publish include heightened stress levels; the marginalization of teaching; and research that may lack relevance, creativity, and innovation.

The sample was intentionally restricted to faculty from management departments affiliated with research‐oriented US business schools and does not include faculty from departments that are less research‐oriented and, therefore, would be expected to put less pressure on their faculty to publish.

Although the effects of pressure to publish are not necessarily always negative, the paper offers some fundamental suggestions to management (and other) faculty who wish to mitigate the deleterious effects of pressure to publish.

Although the findings may not be surprising to more seasoned faculty, to the authors' knowledge this is the first time they have been documented in the published literature. As such, they advance discussions of “publish or perish” beyond mere conjecture and “shared myths” allowing management faculty to more rationally debate its consequences and their implications for academic life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between positive incentives (perceived organisational support) and negative incentives (publish or perish), on both academic publication productivity and marketing academics’ quality of life. While publish-or-perish pressure is a common technique to improve academics’ performance, its punishment orientation may be poorly suited to the uncertain, creative work that research entails and be harmful to academics’ life satisfaction and other well-being variables. In particular, it may interfere with family commitments, and harm the careers of academic women. While perceived organisational support may be effective in encouraging research outputs and be positive for well-being, it may be insufficient as a motivator in the increasingly competitive and pressured world of academia. These issues are important for individual academics, for schools wishing to attract good staff, and the wider marketing discipline wanting to ensure high productivity and quality of life amongst its members.

A conceptual model was developed and empirically tested using self-report survey data from 1,005 academics across five continents. AMOS structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The findings indicate that the most important determinants of publishing success and improved well-being of academics is organisational support rather than a “publish-or-perish” culture.

The use of a self-report survey may have an impact (and potential bias) on the perceived importance and career effect of a “publish-or-perish” culture. However, current levels of the publish-or-perish culture appear to have become harmful, even for top academic publishers. Additional longitudinal data collection is proposed.

The challenge to develop tertiary systems that support and facilitate world-leading research environments may reside more in organisational support, both perceived and real, rather than a continuation (or adoption) of a publish-or-perish environment. There are personal costs, in the form of health concerns and work–family conflict, associated with academic success, more so for women than men.

This study is the first to empirically demonstrate the influence and importance of “publish-or-perish” and“perceived organisational support” management approaches on marketing academic publishing performance and academic well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the pressures to publish facing European public relations (PR) and communication management scholars across career stages.

The Delphi method was used with PR and communication management scholars at associate professor level or higher across Europe. An online survey was then shared with the wider academic community to gather insights from scholars at different career stages.

The suitability and status of the journal and the language of the outputs are considered. Academics are caught between the rock of publishing inside the field to support its development and the hard place of being required to publish in high-ranking journals for funding and promotion. Scholars are evaluated regularly, with journal articles being the main unit of assessment. Academics, regardless of career stage, feel under pressure to publish.

The wider survey enabled publishing insights to be gathered from academics across the career spectrum, but it was completed by a small sample. Nevertheless, similar concerns emerged from both methods of data gathering, suggesting a clear agenda for discussion and further research.

PR and communications management is an academic discipline without an accepted list of high-impact journals. This study provides an annotated journal list to aid institutional evaluations, aid scholarly journal publishing decisions and support early career researchers navigating the publishing process.

This adds to the somewhat limited discussion regarding how academics in PR and communication management decide where to publish and provides a resource that can be used by scholars, institutions and funders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how Ukrainian scholars recognize and react to a situation of an absence of two major institutional logics of academic writing and publishing, namely the logics of science advancement and personal career promotion and the dominance of the logic of coercive pressures to publish regardless of quality and resonance and with no material and reputational rewards. Two fundamental and essential logics that drive research activity at any university in western societies seem to be almost absent in Ukrainian context, where symbolic publishing for accountability only is taken-for-granted.

The study adopts qualitative interpretative research methodology. The scholars from seven universities were interviewed, including 16 senior scholars and 15 PhD students.

The study shows the dominance of a single logic of accountability which is persisted due to coercive pressures exerted on scholars. Despite the absence of instrumental value behind publishing requirements in Ukrainian higher education system, most academics do not question this policy and largely take it for granted as the only possible system.

Research conducted in this study contributes to institutional logics and institutional complexity literature by highlighting a unique situation of institutional complexity when logic that offers neither economic nor social benefits dominates the field. It is shown how actors recognize, interpret and respond to this situation, identifying three types of responses that range from blind adherence to taken-for-granted institutional definitions to strategic balance between coercive pressures and desired logics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine researchers’ motivations to publish by comparing different career stages (PhD students; temporarily employed postdocs/new professors; scholars with permanent employment) with regard to epistemic, pragmatic, and personal motives.

This qualitative analysis is mainly based on semi-structured narrative interviews with 91 researchers in the humanities, social, and natural sciences, based at six renowned (anonymous) universities in Germany, the UK, and the USA. These narratives contain answers to the direct question “why do you publish?” as well as remarks on motivations to publish in relation to other questions and themes. The interdisciplinary interpretation is based on both sociological science studies and philosophy of science in practice.

At each career stage, epistemic, pragmatic, and personal motivations to publish are weighed differently. Confirming earlier studies, the authors find that PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in temporary positions mainly feel pressured to publish for career-related reasons. However, across status groups, researchers also want to publish in order to support collective knowledge generation.

The sample of interviewees may be biased toward those interested in reflecting on their day-to-day work.

Continuous and collective reflection is imperative for preventing uncritical internalization of pragmatic reasons to publish. Creating occasions for reflection is a task not only of researchers themselves, but also of administrators, funders, and other stakeholders.

Most studies have illuminated how researchers publish while adapting to or growing into the contemporary publish-or-perish culture. This paper addresses the rarely asked question why researchers publish at all.

This study revisits the discourse on the neoliberalization of business schools and explores how accreditation-linked institutional pressures catalyze cultural change that adversely impact academic labor and academic subjectivities in the Global South.

This study is based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics from elite business schools in India.

This study shows how academics encounter institutional pressures in Indian business schools. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the conception of the ideal academic that existed before accreditation, (2) how the conception of the ideal academic was fundamentally transformed during and after accreditation, and (3) the challenges academics experienced in achieving the performance targets introduced by accreditation-linked institutional pressures.

This study offers two contributions to the extant literature on business schools located in the Global South: (1) it illustrates how organizational changes within business schools in India are structured by accreditation-linked institutional pressures coming from the Global North, and (2) it adds to the growing body of work on neoliberal governmentality by highlighting the implications of accreditation-liked institutional pressures on academic subjectivities.

The study aims to assess the journal packing density (JPD) of the research journals published across different subject discipline at the global level. The concept of JPD is aimed to compute the average number of research articles published per volume or per issue of a research journal in any given subject discipline. The study also discusses about the leading research journals publishing countries and continents across the world and their average JPD. An attempt has also been made to identify the leading research counties having maximum JPD in any given subject discipline.

The study covers 27 major research subject disciplines widely popular all across the globe. To undertake the present study, data were retrieved from SCImago Journal and Country Ranking.

In all, 36,081 research journals were indexed by Scopus across 27 major subject disciplines at the global level till 2015. During the period 2013-2015, 11,023,122 research articles were published in 36,081 research journals across 27 major subject disciplines at the global level at an average of 101.84 research articles per journal per volume. This means the average JPD of the research journals at the global level is 101.84 research articles per journal per volume. Chemistry, physics and astronomy and multidisciplinary journals are the three leading subject disciplines to have the maximum JPD, namely, 266.66, 253.92 and 242.53 research articles per journal per volume. JPD of research journals published in the sciences is higher than the JPD of research journals published in the social sciences and humanities. Business, management and accounting, social sciences and arts and humanities are three subject disciplines having lowest JPD, namely, 44.26, 35.68 and 32.66 research articles per journal per volume, respectively. China, Ireland and The Netherlands recorded the highest average JPD in the research journals published from these counties, namely, 213.39, 178.44 and 135.31 research articles per journal per volume, respectively.

Countries from where a lesser number of research journals are indexed by the popular indexes, such as Scopus, Web of Science, etc., face greater pressure of publishing. To ooze out this pressure, there is need to index more and more research journals from these countries and that can be done only by improving and maintaining the research standard over a period.

The study is original and the first of its kind undertaken at the global level across all the major subject disciplines.

Implementation of research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity has transformed higher education institutions globally, reshaping academic work and the academic profession. Most lately, the mantra of “publish or no degree” has become the norm in many contexts. There has been little empirical research into the unintended consequences of this neoliberal academic performativity for inexperienced researchers. This article focuses on the role institutional research evaluation policies play on doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates’ publication practices and on their decision to sometimes publish in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards in particular through the concept of figured worlds.

The study was conducted in a higher education setting employing a variety of research incentive schemes to boost research productivity where “publish or no degree” policy is the norm. It employs qualitative approach and involves in-depth interviews with nine doctoral students and seven early career academics who have been working part-time or full-time for five years following PhD completion.

Findings demonstrate publishing in journals with ethically “questionable” publishing standards is not always simply the result of naivety or inexperience. Some authors choose these journals in order to retain a sense of self-efficacy in the face of rejection by more highly ranked journals. Under institutional pressure to publish, they are socialized into this “shadow academia” through (existing) academic networks, conferences and journal special issues.

It is often assumed that scholars are trapped into “questionable” journals through the use of unsolicited emails. This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating the crucial role research evaluation policies based on neoliberal orientations of performativity and contextual dynamics play on the publication practices of doctoral students and early-career doctoral graduates on their decision to submit to journals with “questionable” publication practices. It introduces the concept of unethical publication brokering, an informal network of ties promising fast and easy publication in outlets that “count”.

In recent times, universities have been faced with the challenge of implementing neoliberal ideas as a survival tactic. For instance, there is increasing pressure on academics globally to publish because of performance funding and other metrics like global rankings, which consider where and how much academics publish. This study explores how neoliberalism in higher education has influenced the academic profession.

The study used two New Zealand universities as case studies to understand how the universities' academics respond to government formula for allocating public funding to universities and also how the universities respond to the changing higher education system in New Zealand. In total, 21 academics were interviewed and documents such as the strategic plans of the universities; policies, guidelines and procedures; Tertiary Education Union reports and media reports were analysed.

The study finds that neoliberal practices could lead to occupational stress that comes with the pressure to publish, increased teaching workload and casualisation of the academic job, especially amongst emerging academics.

Whilst the topic is not entirely original, this study is pertinent and offers the following advice to stakeholders. A university's success is a function of its academics, and academics perform at an exceptional level because academics want to, not because academics are being made to. Unless governments and universities address the intense competition that results from funding allocation procedures, the less well-off academics will fail and some will be forced to compromise the duties that academics have. A collaborative and collegial higher education system that focuses on serving the public good can be an alternative.

While there has been extensive commentary and research on issues relating to student academic integrity, the behavior (or misbehavior) of faculty has been less explored. Research misconduct and misbehavior is shaped by environmental forces acting at four distinct levels: individual, organizational, educational system, and social (Anderson, 2011; see also Bertram Gallant & Kalichman, 2011). This chapter explores the current climate in higher education whereby academics are under increasing pressure to publish, and how this pressure impacts standards of ethical conduct in academic publishing in the online environment. The chapter argues that to maintain integrity in online publishing environments, there needs to be a multi-stakeholder approach that encompasses each of the environmental levels, from educational policy makers, to senior managers, to teaching academics and advisors, to editors and finally to individual researchers/authors. In addition to recognizing the value of including standard protocols in online journals' instructions to authors, this chapter makes the case for a politicized response to the seemingly limitless pressure on academics to prove their worth by measuring their intellectual outputs.