This study investigates doctoral students' perceptions of themselves as academic writers and the factors contributing to this perception. Adopting content analysis and narrative inquiry, we conducted a survey with 121 responses from candidates at ten universities across Australia and semi-structured interviews with 12 candidates. The survey shows that candidates consider publishing in academic journals essential for them to feel like academic writers. The candidates further clarified that it was not simply the external recognition from successful publications that helped them identify as academic writers but the mutual recognition they gained from co-authoring and collaborating with other academics and the self-recognition they experienced when developing their research capacity. Interviews confirm the importance of academic publishing but reveal more factors shaping candidates' writer identity, including academic writing experience, range of writing genres mastered, career aspirations, and other (writer) identities assumed. We conclude that external recognition from academic journals, though important, is not the precondition for doctoral students' writer identity. We further argue that doctoral students can proactively seek various types of recognition to temper their struggle to gain external recognition from academic journals. For example, external recognition from supervisors, mutual recognition among co-authors, and self-recognition can all strengthen doctoral students' writer identity.