The growing pressure to 'publish or perish', experienced by academia around the world, has pushed an increasing number of individual graduate programmes and universities, as well as entire higher education systems, to introduce a publication requirement as a prerequisite for the conferral of doctoral degrees. One example of the implementation of…

Publishing is a critical avenue for scholars and a significant challenge for Chinese doctoral students. This study employs online ethnography to examine discussions on academic publishing anomie in the 'Graduated Group', including interviews with 10 doctoral students to explore the dynamics of academic misconduct. Under the high-pressure…

Writing and publishing are critical components of an academic career. For many years however, my idealized notions of scholarly writing were demolished by painful and traumatic attempts to publish. The significant time and effort poured into crafting an academic article yielded desk rejection after desk rejection, at times unkind and unhelpful…

The aim of this paper is to discern the difficulties tenure track faculty face as they attempt to balance their new faculty roles amid a transition from PhD student to faculty. Based on the theoretical Lazarus model of stress, this research analyzes the stressful transition of a PhD student to a tenure track professor and the underlying reasons…

Publishing prior to completing graduate school is increasingly institutionalised through institutional policies in ways that pressurise doctoral students to publish as a graduation requirement or encourage them to do so to gain advantages in the academic job market. However, no systematic review of the role predoctoral publications play in shaping…

For some time, academics have reported the increasing complexity and demands of work (Clegg, S. 2008. "Academic Identities Under Threat?" "British Educational Research Journal" 34 (3): 329-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701532269), including the difficulty of gaining permanence (Taylor, A. 2018. "Scientists Don't…

While there exists an extensive body of literature on Early Career Researchers (ECRs), there has been a notable lack of focus on the hurdles encountered by ECRs in social sciences at local universities when it comes to academic publishing. This study addresses this gap by conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 15 Chinese university…