Publish and Perish

As generative AI and paper mills flood academic publishing with industrial-scale fraud, higher education faces a reckoning: The metrics built to evaluate faculty productivity are now accelerating the decline of scientific integrity. Once a quirky incentive problem, it has become a governance and reputational crisis. Paper mills have evolved into AI-powered factories producing thousands of automated manuscripts and fake peer reviews, overwhelming journals and making fraud harder to detect.

This escalation does not occur in a vacuum. Wired captured it bluntly with the headline “The Black Market for Fake Science Is Growing Faster Than Legitimate Research, Study Warns,” based on work by Northwestern University scholars. It includes data manipulation, purchased authorship, paid citations and manufactured results.

This is not about isolated bad actors; these are not bugs in the system. Academic leaders often express shock when fraud is uncovered. They should not. When careers depend on publication count and count itself becomes the defining success metric, some will cheat to seek prestige.

In 1776, Adam Smith famously noted in The Wealth of Nations that self-interest is a powerful driver of rational behavior. We teach this fundamental principle in every Econ 101 class. Yet we fail to incorporate it into our systems of faculty evaluation and advancement.

The Count Meter and Its Consequences

Many years ago, a colleague said, “Finally, my paper got a resting place in a top journal.” We laughed, but the joke concealed a brutal truth—a resting place is also a burial site. The paper was entombed, embalmed with prestige, featured as a line on an academic CV and forgotten. This is the outcome of the publish-or-perish culture that pervades academia, where an overwhelming majority of papers are published, simply to perish in obscurity. This is not cynicism. It is the predictable result of a broken academic system and flawed ranking agencies that confuse publication with contribution and count with impact.

Business schools have perfected this pathology. Rankings that focus on counts of top journal publications and school-funded summer research support reward quantity rather than impact. Unlike engineering, public health or medical programs—where faculty must raise grant support—business schools often operate without a market mechanism to discipline research priorities.

This behavior has progressively worsened over the last three decades, with the consequences impossible to ignore. Clarivate’s Web of Science and other indexing services have begun delisting compromised or predatory journals, erasing citations and undermining institutional reputations overnight. Universities that rely on journal lists and citation counts as proxies for quality now face direct exposure: A faculty member’s “impact” can disappear with a single indexing decision.

Doubtless, it is fashionable to talk about what ails academia today, with explanations spanning a wide gamut, ranging from threats posed by declining funding to public distrust and artificial intelligence. But this self-inflicted obsession with publication count is rarely discussed. We have engineered a system where survival depends on feeding the count meter, not necessarily on advancing knowledge. Merit reviews have become count reviews.

We recently heard a business school dean boast about a faculty member who boosted the school’s research ranking with dozens of elite journal publications. As one of our mentors once warned, that sounds “too prolific to be profound.” When asked what this scholar was actually known for, the dean could not answer. That silence says everything.

As junior faculty members, we were repeatedly told that tenure required being known for something: an idea, a field or a contribution, a unique intellectual signature. Today, what matters is not being known for an idea but being known for count. The count meter ticks relentlessly, tracking how many papers you can place in a (very) short list of journals and how many citations your work is garnering. In fact, tenure requirements are reduced to five or some expected papers in top journals rather than a discussion of impact. It is a mockery that count has replaced impact and relevance for a lifetime appointment.

This fixation on numbers produces predictable and corrosive behaviors. Authors strategically cite editors to curry favor. Faculty participate in citation cartels under the guise of collegiality and talk of informal networks to trade reviews, acceptances and references like currency. These practices are whispered about, joked about and quietly tolerated because they deliver what the system demands: higher counts.

Warnings have come from Cambridge University Press, the American Economic Association and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. AACSB’s evolving standards now emphasize societal impact—pressure that many business school deans are scrambling to meet. Yet institutions continue to reward precisely the behavior these bodies condemn. Pathologies of academic research recently attracted congressional scrutiny: U.S. lawmakers agree that reform is sorely needed.

What Impact Should Mean

We see and experience the existence of this corrosive culture but respond like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. This problem is acute and worsening every day. An article in Nature famously reported an open market in which co-authorship itself is for sale.

The intellectual and societal cost of our collective obsession with publication count over impact is staggering. Curiosity is replaced by mass production, so much so that researchers are overwhelmed with the volume of published papers, described as the “strain on scientific publishing.”

In our own field, information systems, methodological virtuosity routinely eclipses meaningful ideas. Randomized experiments proliferate not to answer important questions, but to manufacture publishable certainty. In an extreme case, one could design a flawless randomized experiment to prove that being hit on the head with an iron rod hurts more than being hit with a balloon stick. The design would be elegant. The result likely publishable. The contribution? Zero or worse. Scarce resources would be wasted to prove the obvious. This is what now passes for rigor. The rigor-versus-relevance debate has been alive for a while across multiple disciplines but has not yet transitioned into our reward and incentive systems.

The journal list has become a curse masquerading as quality control. Nobel laureate James Heckman moderated an influential panel at the American Economic Association annual meeting, warning of the curse of the top five journals in economics. He noted that more than 70 percent of the most cited papers in economics over the past 10 years were published elsewhere and that more than 80 percent of the papers among top 50 scholars appear outside of the top five journals. Another Nobel laureate, George Akerlof, offered an analogy drawn from entomologists’ study of beetles to illustrate how gatekeepers reward similarity over insight where conformity triumphs over innovation.

So, what is research impact? Advancing knowledge within the discipline—making a distinctive, novel and important contribution—is essential. But this cannot be determined solely through where the research was published and how many citations it garnered. Faculty advancement processes must require the evaluators to read the papers rather than rely on the CV. And impact doesn’t end there: Influencing policy, being featured in prominent media, testifying as an expert, translating research findings for organizations and educating executives are all important indicators of a scholar’s impact. And, sadly, they are rarely considered during promotion and tenure discussions. 

Meanwhile, teaching—the very reason universities exist—has been relegated to an inconvenience. As academic leaders, we persistently field demands for teaching relief, not due to work overload from an important assignment, but because faculty simply do not want to teach and/or because their count of research papers matters more. Highly paid professors lobby to teach one to five students indefinitely while administrators look away to avoid conflict. Faculty governance is weaponized to preserve privilege, not to protect and advance the noble mission of discovery.

Fixing the Incentives

If higher education wants to reverse course, institutions must confront the incentive structures that created this crisis. Three steps would meaningfully shift the culture:

1. Evaluate fewer papers, but more deeply. Promotion committees should assess a candidate’s top three to five publications, forcing reviewers to read the work rather than count papers and citations.
2. Broaden what counts as impact—especially teaching and research support. Institutions should formally weigh executive education leadership, research-teaching integration, creation of new or specialized courses, high-impact curricula, the ability to reach and shape large numbers of students, and the securing of grants or philanthropic gifts that enable consequential research alongside traditional research metrics.
3. Audit citation practices. Universities should monitor for citation cartels, editor self-citing and anomalous patterns increasingly penalized by indexing services.

Challenging this culture has consequences. Fighting deeply ingrained practices that are self-perpetuating and passed down through generations in an apprenticeship faculty development model is extremely hard. But if universities continue to reward burial over influence, mass production over purpose and prestige over truth, they will accelerate their own irrelevance. The question is not whether we can publish more papers. We already do. The question is whether academia still has the courage to value work that actually matters—and whether we are willing to overhaul how we measure academic success before the next wave of AI-generated fraud and journal delistings forces the issue.

Otherwise, we sadly will continue to publish and perish.