Chapter 6: Quantity versus Quality: The Publication Quagmire

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s [OECD] 2015 Education Report, in Mexico, only 38% of people will enter tertiary education in their lifetime. Further, while the OECD average is 22% for people expected to earn a master’s degree and 2% a doctoral degree, the forecast for Mexico, is that only 4% of the national population is to achieve a master’s degree, and less than 1% a doctorate. To address a lacuna of citizens with advanced degrees, leaders of national educational institutions in Mexico have endeavored to offer doctoral programs in order to develop internationally competitive researchers.

When first thinking about entering a doctoral program in 2014, I knew publications were going to be of paramount significance. What was not so obvious back then, was the rat race to publish as much as possible from day one and how overwhelming this can be when you are a newcomer. From the moment that I began the program – about a year ago (at the time of writing) – professors would recite the message that we were now in a situation where the motto for the rest of our academic life would be “publish or perish” and “the more the better.” It was fairly easy to realize that “without peer reviewed publications, our careers will either come to a halt or change radically” (Day, 2011, p. 704).