When Dave Rapson was finishing his Ph.D. in economics at Boston University a decade ago, hiring committees didn’t necessarily expect candidates who were fresh out of graduate school to have published journal articles on top of their dissertations. Now, as an associate professor and grad-student placement officer at the University of California at Davis, Rapson says, “it really is becoming more of an expectation to have a publication or multiple publications.”
The pressure to publish before earning a doctorate has been gradually building for decades, but the dismal job market since the Great Recession has amped it up. Unlike cyclical hiring booms and busts of the past, the general economic rebound since 2008-9 hasn’t been accompanied by a resurgence in academic hiring. The number of new doctorates yearly greatly exceeds the number of available tenure-track positions, and adjuncts continue to make up about 70 percent of the faculty. The foreseeable future, then, looks to remain brutally competitive, adding fuel to expectations to publish early.
“I don’t see it going back,” says David Kastan, a professor of English at Yale University who calls this “the new normal” for academic careers.
“Departments want to hire people who already know how to publish and get grants,” Carolyn Kapinus, dean of Texas Woman’s University’s Graduate School, writes in an email. “They are looking for demonstrated research success.”
“Some students want to delay graduation so that they can rack up more publications,” she writes, “which can actually increase time to degree. This also means that research mentoring is increasingly important for future job success. Savvy students know this and use this as a criterion to pick a graduate program and potential faculty mentor. Other students are opting out of the academic job market completely.”
The pressure to publish has even trickled down to the undergraduate level.
The bigger demands on grad students place more demands on their departments too, says Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University, an authority on the economics of higher education. In recent years, top-ranked econ Ph.D. programs, for instance, upped their financial support of grad students from five years to six. Institutions down the pecking order have begun to selectively do the same for top students, he says. Not long ago, most of his grad students finished in four or five years. Of Cornell’s current graduating econ doctorates whose times to degree he could calculate, eight took six years, two took seven, and only one took five. That extra time is largely focused on publishing.
The growing adjunct work force, or what Yale’s Kastan terms the “Uberization” of academe, means that it’s become “a postdoc world.” When he got his doctorate in 1975, almost everyone got jobs in their sixth year of grad school. Now that’s very rare. There are occasional “unicorns,” he says, but it usually takes two or three years of visiting or assistant professorships to land a tenure-track job. He says that most graduate schools run programs to professionalize their students from their third year on — helping them come up with strategies for their seminar papers, dissertation chapters, and research papers, and, later, prepare for interviews. “I always tell students two publications would be fine,” he says. “But certainly one, and maybe one additional one that’s under consideration at a journal.”
Sometimes an Equalizer
Although the publishing push makes grad school more difficult, it can also work as something of an equalizer, letting students outside top-tier universities demonstrate their research skills. A strong publication record is more important than a big-name school, says Blanca Lapizco-Encinas, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “The employer is not hiring the university, she says, “they’re hiring the people.” A crop of go-getter research-paper writers, in turn, can bring attention to a particular department or university. “If my students look good and productive, I look good and productive too.”
Online and open-access journals have also proliferated, co-evolving with this publishing fever.
Grad students have grown shrewd about turning seminar papers and early dissertation chapters into journal articles. More important than shrewdness, though, is pure enthusiasm.
“I just took every opportunity that was put in front of me,” says Erin S. Lavender-Stott, who this spring earned her doctorate from Virginia Tech in human development and family science. She is headed to a tenure-track assistant professorship at South Dakota State University. “I’m very much a Yes person,” she says. “That’s really how I ended up with the publications that I have.” In addition to her dissertation, she wrote or co-authored five peer-reviewed journal articles, two book reviews in journals, and three book chapters, with a fourth one in the works.
The pressure to publish has also trickled down to the undergraduate level. If a research-oriented grad student is more likely to make a good professor, then it follows that a research-oriented undergrad is more likely to make a good graduate student. Students in bachelor’s programs are now writing or co-writing numerous papers. Lapizco-Encinas cites a recent RIT student, Alexandra LaLonde, who earned her bachelor’s with seven papers to her name. She was the primary author of three of them. After she graduated from the biomedical-engineering program, she got a job at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a section where most of her colleagues have master’s degrees or Ph.D.s. LaLonde says that at some point she would like to go to law school.
Differences by Discipline
Although it has increased across the board, the pressure to publish varies by field, says John T. McGreevy, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. It’s still less in economics than it is in other social sciences like sociology and political science, he says, and it is becoming a more significant factor in the humanities.
Hiring committees used to put a lot of weight on the recommendations of a graduate’s dissertation advisers, says Rapson, the UC-Davis economist. They might still consider that, but a peer-reviewed paper — if not in one of the discipline’s handful of top journals, then in a reputable subdiscipline’s journal — is now considered crucial because it is seen as a clearer indicator that a candidate is a good investment.
“When you come out of a Ph.D. program, you’re very much a work in progress,” he says, “so there’s a lot of uncertainty about how productive you’ll be as a scholar and a researcher.” A journal article sends “a strong signal about that future quality.”
Rapson has his second-year Ph.D. students write a research proposal and strongly encourages them to think of it not only as the seed of a dissertation chapter but as the launching point for a paper. New techniques help them fast-track their research, he says. For his own dissertation, he recalls, “I spent weeks in the bowels of the Harvard Business School library.” His students might use Perl coding script to scrape data from a website for a couple weeks while they work on other things, then come back and analyze the results. “The way we actually do our research is making it easier for teched up young grad students to really distinguish themselves.”
Karen P. DePauw, vice president and dean for graduate education at Virginia Tech, understands how students might think of the need to publish as pressure, but she wants them to conceive of it instead as an opportunity — and to approach their dissertations accordingly. She counsels them to consider writing a manuscript-style dissertation made up of distinct research chapters that are more easily adaptable for journal articles, rather than a traditional book-style work to be converted later into a monograph. Science and some social-science fields have trended that way for decades, and Virginia Tech makes it clear, DePauw says, that one paper is the expectation for master’s students, two for doctoral students. She and some faculty members would prefer to see two from students in master’s programs and three from Ph.D. candidates.
She is aware, however, that there can be too much of a good thing. “In what I believe to be the ethics of publishing,” she says, “we should provide meaningful publications that are of quality, not just going for quantity.” She’s wary of the “salami” approach: slicing research conclusions thinly to maximize the number of bylines.
It’s a balancing act, says McGreevy. “Obviously you worry about two things: You don’t want a premature publication that really isn’t very good, but you also don’t want to extend time to degree.”
“People get themselves tied into knots about publishing,” says Lavender-Stott, the new Virginia Tech doctorate. “They think, how many publications do I have to have, what’s my benchmark, rather than do it in ways that you enjoy.” The key, she says, is finding that “there’s a rhythm to it, there’s an enjoyment to it — finding that internal motivation. It’s something we have to do. We have to show that we can make the jump from grad student to professor.”
Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
