This study examines the structural conditions that sustain shallow research practices in Indonesian communication education. It argues that the problem is not one of individual weakness but of systemic pressures, including publication mandates, managerial evaluation systems and metrics-driven governance, which collectively undermine scholarly integrity and intellectual development.
The study employs a qualitative approach, drawing on Andrew Abbott’s disciplinary ecologies as a conceptual framework. Empirical data were collected through three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 17 alumni (undergraduate, master’s and doctoral) and three journal editors.
The analysis reveals that mandatory student publications, journal proliferation and weakened peer review processes have normalised a performative academic culture. Supervisors often exploit student work for co-authorship, journals function as bureaucratic instruments rather than scholarly forums and citation incentives encourage strategic but superficial publishing behaviours. These dynamics erode research quality, alienate students, distort disciplinary identity and marginalise Indonesian communication studies in global academia.
This study offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of academic publishing culture in Indonesian communication education and scholarship in general, situating it within broader critiques of metrics-driven academia. By foregrounding how structural pressures are lived and reproduced in everyday academic practices, it highlights the urgent need for reform and positions Indonesian communication studies within wider debates on decolonising knowledge and resisting the neoliberalisation of higher education.
