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Dedicating time to publishing works means less time spent on teaching preparation , delivery and / or assessment .
Publish or perish ?
Should all academics be required to publish ?
By Angus Hooke and Greg Whateley
As competition to attract the attention of prospective students intensifies , the higher education sector finds itself grappling with the question : should every academic be required to publish research ?
In the academic world the same questions keep resurfacing . Quite often , they resurface because the earlier answers have been forgotten or were never known by a new generation . Or because circumstances have changed , and those same questions could now be answered in a different way .
One such question concerns the relationship between research and teaching : Should academic institutions and those who work within them be divided into those focused wholly on research and those focused wholly on teaching ? Or should all institutions and their teaching academic staff be required to do both ?
COUNTING THE NUMBER OF ACADEMICS WORLDWIDE
In October 2017 , The World Bank estimated some 200 million students were attending higher education institutions ( HEIs ) globally . For academic numbers , precise data are available for some countries ( eg the UK and US ) while broad estimates can be made for other leading OECD countries . They indicate that , for the higherincome countries – which contain about 60 per cent of the world ’ s universities – the student-to-academic staff ratio ( SSR ) is about 14 . Assuming the ratio is double within the remaining , generally poorer countries , the global SSR for universities would have been about 20 . That implies that the global university sector employed about 5 million academics . The same SSR ratio of 20 is also assumed for non-university HEIs globally .
By simple calculation , that suggests there were about 10 million academics globally on the 2017 figures .
ACADEMICS VS ACADEMIC ARTICLES PUBLISHED EACH YEAR
For a manuscript to be accepted by an academic journal , it must ( normally ) identify a gap in the existing body of knowledge and make a contribution that , in part at least , fills this gap . Any research undertaken must include sufficient detail for another qualified researcher to repeat the experiment or survey to verify the results .
Prior to publication , the article should pass successfully through a double-blind review process .
There appear to be no authoritative estimates of the global number of academic journals , or of the number of articles they publish . Altbach and de Witt ( 2018 ) claim that “ several estimates point to around 30,000 [ academic journals ], with close to two million articles published each year ”.
However , not all of these journals are accepted as quality publications . The standard of peer reviews and the criteria for selection vary greatly among journals , publishers and fields .
Excellence in Research Australia ( ERA ), for instance , identifies just over 21,000 journals that it accepts when evaluating applications for grants from the Australian Research Council .
COMPETING FOR SPACE Casual observations suggest that more than 90 per cent of articles in recognised quality journals are written by academics in universities and specialists in research institutions . Very few come from the non-university HEIs .
There is considerable pressure on universities to generate , evaluate and ( most importantly ) publish research in peer-reviewed journals . Academics in universities also place considerable pressure on themselves to publish , both to gain promotion and to earn the respect of their colleagues .
Increasingly , non-university HEIs have been trying to improve their status and present more like the universities , by requiring their own teaching staff also engage in and publish research .
If we accept that there are 10 million academics teaching in higher education institutions ; assume that half of these would like to publish in academic journals ; accept Altbach / de Witt ’ s figure that 2 million academic articles are published each year ; and assume that three quarters of these articles would be accepted as being of sufficient quality by regulatory education authorities in OECD countries – that adds up to five million academics competing for 1.5 million articles every year .
SHOULD ALL ACADEMICS BE REQUIRED TO PUBLISH ? Requiring staff in non-university HEIs to publish would likely have two major effects , both adverse .
Firstly , it would set them up for failure : there are simply not enough vacant spaces in journals for more than a small percentage ( say , 5 per cent ) to publish an article in any given year .
Secondly , dedicating time to publishing works means less time spent on teaching preparation , delivery and / or assessment . The latter would , in turn , have the potential to lower the national average on student experience and satisfaction as measured in the annual QILT surveys .
Hence instead of “ should all academics be required to publish ?”, perhaps the real question we should be asking is “ what tangible benefit would such a requirement deliver ?”. ■
Professor Angus Hooke is senior scholarship fellow and Emeritus Professor Greg Whateley is deputy vice-chancellor at Group Colleges Australia .
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