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The phrase “publish or perish” is the dictum of modern academic survival. It sums up what many researchers at universities and colleges across the world understand about their careers: If you want to stick around, get your work published in high-impact journals.
But, like many common phrases in the English language, it didn’t always have this interpretation.
Vladimir Moskovkin, a geographer based in the Czech Republic, explored the origin and evolution of “publish or perish” in a recent post on Leiden Metrics, the official blog of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Moskovkin discovered a 1934 biography of the “father of American geography,” William Morris Davis, written by Isaiah Bowman, a former president of Johns Hopkins University, that says: “To Professor Davis is due the organization of the Association of American Geographers in 1904, at a meeting in his native Philadelphia. He immediately urged that the Association ‘publish or perish’. ‘If it's worth doing it's worth printing,’ was his advice to students.”
Moskovkin also uncovered a 1973 attribution from Swiss historian Werner Kaegi to Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt, an influential Swiss historian of art and culture.
“Since Jacob Burckhardt died in 1897, the literary proven reference to the slogan ‘publish or perish’ should be pushed back from the early 20th century (William Morris Davis, 1904) to at least the late 19th century,” Moskovkin writes.
Originally used as a call to action to publish the latest scientific discoveries, “publish or perish” took on a negative meaning in the 1930s when the then president of Harvard University, James Bryant Conant, dismissed faculty members for failing to publish a sufficient number of papers.
Our modern understanding of the phrase began to solidify in the early 1990s, when higher education leaders started using journal impact factors, the average number of times articles in a journal published in the previous two years are cited, as criteria for scientists’ career progression. “Then the real publication race under the slogan ‘publish or perish’ began,” Moskovkin writes. When the U.S. Institute for Scientific Information was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, “the journal impact factor was put at the service of commercial publishers, who began to monopolise the market of scientific periodicals,” Moskovkin says.
He ends his post with a warning that if the phrase, and the highly competitive, commercially driven research environment it describes, continues, it “will be replaced by ‘publish best or do not publish at all’.”
