Are we publishing ourselves to death?

By Noel Galon de Leon

I have long wanted to ask our universities: When did the number of research papers a faculty member publishes become a measure of how good a teacher or scholar is? When did we begin to assume that someone is a better academic simply because they have a longer list of publications, a higher citation count, or more journal titles displayed on a faculty profile? These questions may sound provocative, but they deserve serious attention because they touch the very purpose of research and scholarship.

I began thinking about these questions after reading a recent article in The Daily Star, “Research should be about pursuing knowledge, not publication numbers.” Its argument is simple but unsettling: we may have gradually forgotten that research is meant to pursue knowledge. Instead, it has increasingly become about production numbers. How many papers this year? How many indexed journals? How many citations? How many points for promotion? These questions may be practical, but when they dominate academic life, something essential can disappear: the reason we conduct research in the first place.

I do not want to blame researchers. In fact, I think it is wrong to blame them. When we talk about “publish or perish,” researchers are often the first people we point to. We act as though the problem is the faculty member who publishes too much, the graduate student who needs another paper, or the professor searching for a journal that will accept a manuscript. But if publications determine promotion, tenure, grants, accreditation, rankings, and professional advancement, then perhaps the system deserves greater scrutiny than the people working within it.

This issue becomes particularly important when we consider universities in Iloilo City. Iloilo is a city filled with universities, colleges, graduate programs, research centers, faculty researchers, students, journals, conferences, and academic communities. We have considerable intellectual capital here, but our academics also carry enormous responsibilities. Many teach throughout the day, attend meetings, supervise students, handle administrative work, participate in extension programs, review theses, prepare proposals, and then have to find time for research and writing.

So before we ask, “How many publications do you have?”, perhaps we should first ask, “What conditions have we provided so that you can produce meaningful research?” Research does not happen in an empty space. It requires time, funding, facilities, mentoring, training, access to sources, institutional support, and opportunities for collaboration. If these conditions are absent, it is unfair to interpret low publication output simply as a lack of commitment. Sometimes the problem is not the researcher. Sometimes the problem is the environment in which the researcher is expected to work.

Research on Philippine higher education has repeatedly pointed to the importance of a supportive research environment. Adequate time, funding, research facilities, mentoring, training, peer support, and institutional incentives can help faculty research flourish. At the same time, heavy teaching loads, financial limitations, administrative responsibilities, lack of training, and publication pressure remain significant obstacles. These realities should change the way we talk about research productivity. Instead of asking only what researchers have produced, we should also ask what universities have done to make meaningful production possible.

When a faculty member has low research output, it is therefore not enough to say that they lack diligence or ambition. Perhaps they teach several subjects. Perhaps they carry an administrative designation. Perhaps they are pursuing a graduate degree while teaching. Perhaps they have no research assistant, inadequate funding, limited access to databases, or insufficient time for fieldwork. Perhaps they have an excellent research idea but cannot afford travel, transcription, data gathering, editing, or publication expenses. And perhaps, most importantly, they may be capable researchers working inside a system that does not adequately support researchers.

This is why I become uncomfortable when conversations about research productivity end with the statement, “Researchers are not doing enough.” Maybe we should ask a different question: Is the academic ecosystem doing enough? There is a difference between a researcher who does not want to conduct research and one who wants to conduct research but lacks time, resources, mentorship, or institutional space. There is also a difference between a faculty member who does not care about scholarship and one who is overwhelmed by responsibilities but continues trying to keep intellectual curiosity alive.

Publication itself is not the enemy. We need research to be published, reviewed, circulated, debated, and made available to other scholars and communities. Researchers need scholarly records, and journals provide important spaces for intellectual exchange. The problem begins when publication becomes a substitute for knowledge production. When being published becomes more important than being significant, something is wrong. When being indexed becomes more important than being relevant, we should become concerned. When citation counts matter more than actual impact, we need to reconsider what our academic systems are rewarding.

This does not mean that we should abandon international standards, peer-reviewed journals, or scholarly databases. These remain important mechanisms for maintaining quality and connecting researchers across countries and disciplines. The question is whether we can use these systems without allowing them to become the entire definition of scholarship. A publication can be prestigious and still have little social relevance. A paper can receive many citations and still fail to address an urgent local problem. Conversely, a modest study can profoundly affect a community without ever becoming highly cited.

Another important issue universities must recognize is that research is not the same across disciplines. Producing a laboratory experiment is not the same as conducting oral history. Community-based research is not the same as bibliometric analysis. Archival research in the humanities is not the same as clinical research. Some studies require laboratories, while others require archives, communities, fieldwork, interviews, or months of reading and reflection. Yet when all forms of scholarship are reduced to the same numerical indicators, these important differences disappear, and the meaning of research becomes unnecessarily narrow.

This is the danger of relying too heavily on metrics. Numbers are easy to report in meetings, annual reports, accreditation documents, and institutional rankings. They are easy to transform into targets and performance indicators. What is much more difficult to measure is depth. It is difficult to count how many students changed their perspective because of a study, how many community leaders used its findings, or how a historical project changed our understanding of a city. It is also difficult to measure the influence of research on a teacher who changed their classroom practice because of something they learned.

But just because something is difficult to measure does not mean it is unimportant. Some of the most valuable contributions of scholarship may never produce impressive numbers. A research project might influence a local policy, preserve an endangered language, document an overlooked community, recover forgotten history, improve classroom practice, or give marginalized people a space to be heard. These contributions may not immediately generate citations or rankings, but they can matter deeply to the people and communities involved. Scholarship should have enough imagination to recognize forms of impact that cannot easily fit into a spreadsheet.

And this is where I want to be provocative: Are our universities producing researchers for society, or are they producing publications for rankings? This is not an accusation against universities. Institutions operate within a competitive higher education environment and must respond to accreditation requirements, rankings, funding structures, and national and international expectations. But the answer to these pressures cannot simply be to place more demands on faculty. If we want more excellent research from Iloilo, we need to provide the conditions that allow researchers to produce excellent work rather than merely asking them to produce more.

Give researchers time. Give them funding. Give them mentorship. Give them research assistants. Give them access to databases and laboratories. Give them editorial support and methodological training. Give them opportunities to collaborate across disciplines and with communities. Above all, give them intellectual breathing room. Excellent research does not always happen at the speed demanded by a spreadsheet. Sometimes researchers need months to read, revise, question their assumptions, return to the field, examine evidence, and rethink an argument before they can produce something genuinely meaningful.

Sometimes you need to read an entire book before realizing that you have been asking the wrong question. Sometimes you need to return to the field because your first interpretation was incomplete. Sometimes you need to remove half of a manuscript because the evidence does not support your argument. Sometimes you have to wait months for archival material. Sometimes you have to admit that you did not discover what you expected to discover. And sometimes the most important result of research is simply a better question. That is not failure. That is research. We should build academic cultures that understand this rather than forcing every project to conform to the logic of speed and numerical productivity.

In the age of artificial intelligence, this conversation becomes even more urgent. We can now produce drafts within seconds, summarize enormous amounts of information, organize references, and generate polished academic prose with unprecedented speed. But speed cannot replace judgment, and automation cannot replace intellectual responsibility. The ability to produce a paper quickly should never become the measure of scholarly excellence. If technology allows us to produce ten papers but none contains a significant new insight, then we must honestly ask what we have actually contributed to knowledge.

I would rather see one research project take two years and make a genuine contribution than see ten papers produced simply to meet an annual quota. I would rather read a carefully developed study that asks an important question than several papers that merely rearrange familiar information. I would rather see scholars take intellectual risks than write what they believe a journal or evaluation committee expects to see. Research should create opportunities for discovery, disagreement, uncertainty, and new thinking. If our systems punish those qualities because they cannot be easily measured, then perhaps our systems need to change.

And this is where I want to return to the researcher. Do not blame them. Fix the system they work in. If a faculty member teaches all day and we demand high research output, reconsider the workload. If we want world-class publications, fund research properly. If we want ethical scholarship, create a culture that does not push people toward desperation. If we want originality, give scholars time to think. If we want research that matters to Iloilo, Panay, and Western Visayas, accept that important research questions do not always begin with, “Which journal will publish this?”

Sometimes the question should begin with something much closer to home: What is happening in our community? What is disappearing from our languages? What is happening to our rivers? What are our teachers struggling with? What is happening to our cities? What are we forgetting about our history? What remains invisible in mainstream scholarship? What does a child in Iloilo need to know about their own culture? What can research change in the life of an ordinary person? When these questions become the starting point of scholarship, perhaps our research culture will also become more meaningful, grounded, and responsive to the communities around us.

I am not saying that we should throw away publication numbers. I am saying we should not worship them. A university is not a publishing factory. A faculty member is not a research machine. A student is not a publication unit. A research paper is not merely another item to be added to an annual report. Research is a way of understanding the world, questioning what we think we know, and creating knowledge that can help us see our communities and ourselves more clearly.

Perhaps, amid our pursuit of rankings, citations, indexed journals, promotion points, and institutional targets, we need to stop for a moment and ask the simplest questions we should never have forgotten: Did we learn something new? Did we understand something more deeply? Did the research challenge an assumption? Did it help a community? Did it change anything? These questions may not always fit neatly into an institutional scorecard, but they may bring us closer to the real meaning of scholarship.

The real measure of research should not be the number of papers we can count, but the depth of knowledge we create, the courage of the questions we ask, the integrity of the process we follow, and the value of the contribution we make. If we want stronger research universities in Iloilo, we should stop treating researchers as numbers on a productivity chart and start treating them as intellectual workers who need time, trust, resources, and support. Research should not merely give us more papers to count. It should give us more truths to understand.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.