In the contemporary higher education environment, the academic philosophy of ‘publish or perish’is being challenged.‘Publish or perish’refers to the pressure in academia to develop and sustain a research career by disseminating research findings in peer-reviewed journals. The philosophy was first documented in 1942 (Garfield, 1996) yet its origins date back to 1665 when peer review was first used as a form of quality control to distinguish scientific journals from book publishing (Tobin, 2002). Peer review remains a principal procedure for judging the quality of research, and weeding out ‘the charlatans, the misguided, and the fools’(Gad-el-Hak, 2004, p. 61). The academic publishing process is important for communicating research findings and demonstrating research quality, and has remained an academic imperative encouraged by research funders and institutional leaders (Colquhoun, 2011). Professional recognition is achieved by publishing in high reputation journals that are regarded as prestigious. Academia tends to reward those with the longest CVs and the most publications (Neill, 2008). Yet there are multiple issues with using academic metrics for determining research quality.

For example, citation analysis is regarded as a poor substitute for qualitative review and peer assessment (Nightingale & Marshall, 2012) and focusing on impact factors may be a disincentive to pursue innovative research that has longer publication timeframes (Alberts, 2013). Quantity does not imply quality and as Gad-el-Hak warns,‘counting the publications of individuals should not be used to evaluate them’(Gadel-Hak, 2004, p. 61).