If you’ve spent time in academia, you’ve probably heard the phrase “publish or perish.” This refers to the idea that, as an academic, if you do not publish research regularly, your career will die. Academic publishing is supposed to be the gold standard of science: you conduct research, you submit it to a journal, your work gets reviewed by other scientists who critique it, you make the changes they require to bring it up to the required standard, and you have a publication.

Publications build your CVs, which in turn builds your career. Advice I have received as a grad student invariably contain “have 2-3 publications before you get your PhD if you want to stay in academia,” and one of the more useful classes I have taken had a professor emphasizing that you need to think of the publishing potential of all the research you undertake prior to even starting the research.

“Publish or perish” neatly exemplifies the idea that if you’re not doing work, you’re just not doing enough.

Beyond being competitive for the job market at graduation, what you publish and how often also determines your chances at getting tenure, that is a job for life at a university. Tenure is highly sought after, even if studies show that the number of tenured jobs available is decreasing while the number of PhD holders is increasing.

“Publish or perish” neatly exemplifies the idea that if you’re not doing work, you’re just not doing enough. This is so ingrained in academic culture that a slew of memes exist revolving around the idea that “you should be writing.” Even though publishing is supposed to be “good” research, and certainly that is still important, publishing is slowly turning into a quantity-over-quality game. There are so many journals that it is difficult to know which have high standards and which do not without spending time researching them. In theory, again, they should all be going through the same peer-review process, but academic publishing is a business, and papers make money. The recent story about three academics managing to get papers published and accepted for publication, even though they were either made up or preposterous, illustrates that there is something broken about academic publishing.

Even for academics without a disability, this expectation of producing work is brutal. There is a lot of guilt that comes with not doing enough, to the point where it even changes what “free time” entails. There is an expectation, especially as a graduate student, that you simply should not have free time. Every moment of your waking day should be spent in pursuit of your degree.

When you have a disability that affects your ability to think, process information, and get things done, this unattainable standard is even further away. I posted earlier about feeling that I could not use fibromyalgia as an “excuse” because I wanted to be held to the same standard as my peers, and that means producing research at the same pace as they are. And yet, if I produce good research but need slightly more time to produce it, I am not as competitive as others in the field. It doesn’t matter if my research is sound or good; if I am not publishing regularly, I am at a disadvantage. 

Currently, I am working on two manuscripts (research papers to be submitted to a journal for publication). One of them is part of my work, while the other is research from my Masters degree that I am finally getting around to turning into publication format. I am trying to churn them out before the year is over because I want to be able to tell my committee that I am finally on the way to getting something published, after three and a half year as a graduate student. I have accomplished many other things this year, and yet it feels that if I don’t manage to submit something for publication, I won’t have quite done enough.

The pernicious thing, too, is that there really isn’t an “enough.” There are lower limits that you should be hitting, but really no upper limits. Even with no disability, this is not a healthy model.