Why a high publication rate doesn’t always reflect success

‘Publish or perish’ is a common mantra in academia. By that metric, I definitely did not perish in 2025.

Last year, I published seven scholarly articles as either the first or corresponding author. As an ex-postdoc who became a research scientist studying astrobiology at Carnegie Science in Washington DC towards the end of last year, I’ve been writing academic articles for more than a decade. I have never before experienced such a bounty of publications. Last year’s publications represent more than 40% of my first- and corresponding-author papers. By almost any measure, it was a wildly successful year. But I’m not here to brag. Rather, I want to point out that just because last year was prolific, it does not mean that the preceding years in which my research output was lower were not also successful.

Invisible progress

I did not produce a single lead-author paper between my final publication as a graduate student in 2017 and the first paper I published as a postdoc in 2022. Having such a huge gap in your publication record usually spells disaster for an early-career researcher. We are judged mainly on our output of scientific publications. The larger the volume of papers and the higher their impact, the better. But any peer-reviewed product is infinitely better than nothing, especially when your career is young and your CV is short. Going several years without a first-author paper is seen as a red flag in the academic job market.

So what was I doing from 2017 to 2022? During those ‘ghost years’, it might have seemed to the outside world that I had disappeared from science, but I wasn’t slacking off in the laboratory. I was discovering myself as a researcher, diving head first into my field of astrobiology, learning methods and developing research concepts — activities that set me on the path to becoming the scientist I am today. Although I contributed as a co-author on a few manuscripts, the projects I led had frustrating false starts; some ended up going nowhere. But when I think about those five paperless years, I don’t feel disappointment and I don’t see failure. Instead, I’m proud of how much I grew. The seven papers I published last year would not exist without those fallow years.

Personal satisfaction alone, however, is not a recipe for survival in academia. If it weren’t for the good graces of more-senior academics looking out for me, my research career certainly would have perished as a result of my lack of publications. Without mentors who supported me, believed in me and took chances on me, I would have left science by now.

Pressure to publish

I know many people who have left (or are considering leaving) academia because they’ve been made to feel that their publication rate was not high enough — and that they, therefore, were not enough. Although it is only one of myriad factors at play, concern over publication rate and staying productive is a contributor to anxiety in people who work in academia¹. When success is distilled into simple metrics, it’s easy to compare and compete. A cut-throat environment doesn’t only lead to poor research, it can drive people to leave science altogether. In fact, nearly half of all scientists depart academia less than a decade after publishing their first paper².

How can we resist the most tragic effects of the publish-or-perish mentality? Here are four suggestions.

First, we must recognize that research takes time — often much longer than a single year. Each of the seven papers I published in 2025 represents several years of hard work that happened to culminate this year. In fact, one of those projects began in 2020; another’s seeds were planted at a workshop held at Carnegie Science in 2022. Unfortunately, many postdoctoral research stints are shorter than the time it takes to see ambitious scientific projects from inception to publication, and research has shown that uncertainty from short-term contracts increases career vulnerability³. We have to find ways to give slow productivity the chance to pay off, and we have to give ourselves and each other the grace to let years go by when science simply takes that long to develop.

Second, whenever possible, mentors should highlight the work of students and postdocs that is still in development. The years of blood, sweat and tears that a PhD student has poured into their nearly submittable papers isn’t something that will be obvious on their CV. Letters of recommendation are a key place in which mentors can highlight students’ unpublished work, but such advocacy can also occur whenever a mentor is invited to give a talk or simply at the bar with colleagues. Shouting out early-career researchers and crediting them whenever possible is so important for less-experienced colleagues’ career advancement.

Third, our academic systems should stimulate early-career researchers to cultivate unique scientific identities by encouraging exploratory pursuits. Although it is important to reward funders with expected deliverables, sometimes the biggest breakthroughs in science come from making unexpected connections between disciplines. I would not be the researcher I am today if I, a planetary scientist by training, hadn’t spent some of my ghost years surreptitiously attending my first philosophy of science course and reading books that introduced me to subjects such as complexity science, information theory and machine learning. We must remember that forging a career in academia is an inherently creative act; early investments in seemingly unrelated endeavours can sow ideas with big pay-offs down the road.

Find the original article and more great content on the Nature Careers Website at doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04062-9