Landes, Marchman and Nielsen - The academic rat race: Dilemmas and problems in the structure of academic competition

The Academic Rat Race:

Dilemmas and Problems in the Structure of Academic Competition 1

Xavier Landes, Martin Marchman and Morten Nielsen

Centre for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism (CESEM), University of Copenhagen

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedited version of an article published in Learning and Teaching.

The definitive publisher-authenticated version Landes, Xavier; Marchman, Martin; Nielsen,

Morten, ‘The Academic Rate Race: Dilemmas and Problems in the Structure of Academic

Competition’, Learning and Teaching, volume 5, number 2, pp.73-90 is available online at:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/latiss/2012/00000005/00000002/art00005

Abstract

The social benefits expected from academia are generally identified as belonging to three broad categories: research,

education and contribution to society in general.. However, evaluating the present situation of academia according to

these criteria reveals a somewhat disturbing phenomenon: an increased pressure to produce articles (in peer-reviewed

journals) has created an unbalanced emphasis on the research criterion at the expense of the latter two. More fatally, this

pressure has turned academia into a rat race, leading to a deep change in the fundamental structure of academic

behaviour, and entailing a self-defeating and hence counter-productive pattern, where more publications is always better

and where it becomes increasingly difficult for researchers to keep up with the new research in their field. The article

identifies in the pressure to publish a problem of collective action. It ends up by raising questions about how to break

this vicious circle and restore a better balance between all three of the social benefits of academia.

This article is an expanded and elaborated version of a shorter article published in Le Monde (‘Les Chercheurs sont 1

prisonniers d’une course à la publication’), Weekendavisen (‘Om forskere og søelefanter’) and in the Journal of the International Institute for Asian Studies (‘On Academia and Sea Elephants’). The authors wish to thank Susan Wright and three anonymous referees for their extremely useful comments.

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Background

One day a renowned Canadian professor confessed to one of us that he was forcing himself to read

one article a week in order to stay somewhat in touch with the growing literature in his field of

specialization. One article was the maximum that he could do taking into account how overloaded

by work he was. Few months later, a top professor in another country acknowledged that he could

not keep up with reading the relevant publications in his field. His strategy to stay informed was to

rely on the supervision of students’ theses. But even with this, it is often difficult to follow the new

developments in one’s field of specialization.

The reader has probably similar stories in mind. They illustrate a problem that most of (if

not all) researchers encounter: a feeling of excessive workload with an excruciating sentiment of

running out of time on all our schedules (publications, readings, supervision, etc.). Among other

troubling phenomena, we bracket off our lives and feel compelled to devote ever-increasing

amounts of time and energy to our work. This of course impacts negatively on our personal life.

We often sense that we spend too little time with our partners, children, relatives and friends. We

sometimes experience loneliness, stress, etc. In short, we experience increasing difficulties to strike

an appropriate work-life balance (Edwards et al. 2009, p.208).

We are what is commonly called “young researchers” on different places on the (non-

tenured!) academic status ladder. The youngest is just finishing his PhD, the oldest have been

working full-time in academia eight years not counting PhD. Two of the authors have been jumping

from post-doc to post-doc grants, in several countries and in different institutions. We deliberately

take our outset in our experiences as young researchers, but we also try to embed and conceptualize

these experiences in a more general framework. Hopefully, the overall picture “rings true” to most

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contemporary academics: our intention is to foster reflection on the issue of over-publication, which

could then, with any luck, be converted into debate and action.

In this essay, we begin with what might seem an overly individualist perspective, and

follow this to its logical conclusion seen through the lens of game theory and economics. We then

gradually incorporate more thinking about the role of institutions etc. Moreover, we are 2

philosophers (doing moral and political philosophy), not social scientists or historians. The

downside of this is that our sociological and historical expertise on the subject is rather thin; the

advantage of this is that we can focus on the more principled and abstract systemic and individual

forces at play.

Our starting point is a study published some years ago that revealed psychological distress

among British academics was worse than for emergency staff (nurses and doctors) (Kinman et al.

2006). Around half of those academics underwent levels of stress that required medical

intervention. According to our personal experience, this pattern is consistent across countries in

Europe or North America. A look at the literature confirms that the phenomenon is widespread

(Catano et al. 2010; Court and Kinman 2009; Winefield et al. 2008). Different places, different

people, same story. In a lot of countries, academics fare worse on well-being scales than other

occupational groups such as emergency staff (Kinman et al. 2006), which would perhaps look

A couple of comments are due here. We are trying to think “bottom-up”, from our individual experiences and 2

perspectives, and not the other way round, from institutions and structural frameworks and “down” to our experiences. There are a host of pertinent questions, themes and perspective that we cannot address in this short essay. Among others, we do not engage issues or literature focused on New Public Management, or the history of the university as an institution even if we acknowledge that such issues are essential for reaching a global and encompassing view on the topic (Larsson 2009; Newfield 2011; Washburn 2005 ).

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incredible to those who credit the image of academics as belonging to a privileged group, some kind

of “elite”. 3

Our argument is that this low quality of work environment is the symptom of a deeper

problem whose origin is quite evident. Academics, i.e. we, are in effect trapped in an unhealthy

form of competition whose essential problem is an overemphasis on publications as the main

criterion of academic performance. We claim that this overemphasis has precipitated academics into

a rat race where we publish more and more to the detriment of other social benefits that research

and higher education are supposed to provide. In other words, we are stuck in a collective action 4

problem where moves that could appear the most rational at the individual level (publishing more

than one’s competitors) in fact worsen the situation of all. 5

In the course of this article, we first present the reasons why we do think that researchers

face a collective action problem, i.e. one of coordination fuelled by distorted incentives. Our 6

argument is that the multiplication of publications that results from the increased pressure to publish

is counter-efficient for knowledge spreading since it is difficult for academics to keep in touch with

the research in their field. (This is of course only one of the problems associated with the increase in

publications.) The second part is devoted to the question of the social benefits of research and

Two remarks. Firstly, the image is widespread among the population that academics belong to the a kind of new 3

‘leisure class’ in a Veblenian way (Veblen 1994), which could be, without a lot of exaggeration, equated to people who work little, have a lot of spare time, travel a lot and enjoy high status. Secondly, it may be a good idea in the future to undertake comparative stress studies between different occupational groups for identifying populations at risk, not only academics.

Of course, we are neither the first nor the only ones to make such a point (Wright 2009).4

Even though a view to how this situation is brought about – what is the history, politically, economically, socially 5

behind the situation – is extremely interesting, we focus mostly on the situation per se and not its origins.

For Russell Hardin collective action problems are the ‘back of the invisible hand’, i.e. the dynamics by which ‘in 6

seeking private interests, we fail to secure greater collective interests’ (Hardin 1982). John Elster sets up two conditions that define a weaker conception of a collective action problem: (1) ‘each individual derives greater benefits under conditions of universal cooperation than he does under conditions of universal noncooperation’; (2) ‘cooperation is individually unstable and individually inaccessible’ (Elster 1985, p.139).

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higher education. We identify three main classes of benefits universities are supposed to deliver:

research, teaching and contribution to the overall society. The overemphasis on publishing does not

only undermine the exchange of ideas (the research dimension), but it also tends to eclipse the two

last dimensions. The third section emphasizes the need for a coordinated solution. In short, due to

the collective action structure of the rat race for publishing, it is very unlikely that any

decentralized, uncoordinated solution would be stable and durable.

1. ‘Publish or (and) Perish’

In academia, terrific levels of publications in peer-reviewed journals have become the prerequisite

for obtaining a tenure position or important funding, and the requirement has turned more pressing

in the context of the current economic downturn. This over-emphasis comes at the cost of other

social benefits, and as we shall argue, even at the cost of the thing that this race for publications is

supposed to foster: research quality.

To put it clearly: we, academics, are stuck into a collective action problem that degenerates

into a race to the bottom ‘in which each individual, responding to the actions of others, generates an

outcome that is successively worse, but where each iteration of the interaction only intensifies their

incentive to act in the same way’ (Heath 2006, p.360). When applying for a position, the 7

probability of being hired does not only depend on our absolute level of publications, but on how

much we have published relatively to our competitors. Job applications naturally mention other

criteria such as the ability to teach, the talent to raise external funds and other fuzzy conditions like

personality traits, and so forth. But, at the end, it is almost exclusively how much we have produced

by comparison with people around us that matters. One reason for this obsession is the ready-to-use

Races to the bottom are common in fiscal competition, labour cost cuts, violence on television, provocation in arts, 7

conspicuous consumption, fashion, etc.

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dimension of the method of counting publications and comparing candidates on this basis. The 8

result is that we face a strong incentive not only to publish, but to publish more than our

competitors. By following this strategy, we therefore raise the standards for everyone else. In other

words, the motto “publish or perish” has often the bitter taste of “publish and perish”.

An analogy borrowed from Robert Frank with male sea elephants illustrates this dynamics.

The bigger a male is, the greater his chances to beat his opponents during fierce fights and thereby

get access to females. In this evolutionary process the competition has reached such a scale that

males regularly suffocate females during reproduction due to their excessive dimensions (Frank

1999, pp.150-152). Since the increase in size among male sea elephants constitutes an evolutionary

strategy to maximize reproductive performance, a self-defeating dynamics is clearly at work

because such increase is collectively sub-optimal. 9

As researchers, we should remind ourselves that to publish more is not an intrinsic good.

First, to be useful a publication should bring forth some new insight. The more academics are

pressured to publish, the more they tend to publish everything. We, the authors, remember the

advice from a colleague: ‘no matter what: just publish, publish everything’. We also each have

colleagues who publish on (almost) any kind of topic, most of us, i.e. the authors and the readers,

have such colleagues. We are maybe a little bit like that. Consequently, the standard for a decent

Partly, this focus on publications is an effect of the competition among universities for attracting funds and new 8

students. ‘Elite educational status is what these students want, and one way a university can provide it is to hire faculty with visible and influential research records’ (Cook and Frank 1995, p.149, emphasis added). Then the question surges up: how to evaluate these ‘visible and influential records’. Confirming the bias toward publication, Philip Cook and Robert Frank notice that ‘(d)irect measures of the quality of a faculty’s research focus primarily on the quantity and influence of its publications’ (Cook and Frank 1995, p.150).

An alternative presentation of what is at the stake here would be to see the excessive rise in the quantity of 9

publications as a negative externality imposed by each researcher on everyone else. (Simply put, an externality (or external effect) happens when the action of an agent imposes costs on another agent who is not a part of such action and, more importantly, has never agreed to have such costs transferred to him. Pollution is an example of a negative externality.)

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amount of publications is rising for everyone and, ceteris paribus, the average quality of

publications goes down for everyone. 10

Secondly, it is a banal point, but someone should read these publications. If not, research

does not produce any gain. To repeat the point, the more academics are pressured to publish, the

less they pay attention to each other’s work, for the simple reason that they do not have the time to

read other people’s stuff. The two cases evoked in the introduction are examples picked out of a

multitude. The overall picture is quite absurd. The average number of readers per academic article

varies from below 1 (it is an average) to few persons. A common joke among academics is to say 11

that four people on the average read our articles: the two anonymous referees, the author herself and

her mother. 12

More seriously, why put such an emphasis on publications if so few people actually access

the knowledge? The trend is troublesome since most of the “innovative” side of academic research

depends on our ability to produce new ideas that are discussed by peers. Academia has always been,

rightly or wrongly, conceived as a community of ideas based on the confrontation of arguments and

inquiries. It stems from the culture of the disputationes at the core of the first universities and it is

the manner by which this kind of interaction becomes collectively beneficial. If competition cannot

Another sign is a recent multiplication of journals, especially online and open-access publications, which, for most of 10

them, are recognized of lower quality than the more established titles. This multiplication just offers additional canals for spreading research.

This number is actually difficult to calculate with precision. It usually refers to the so-called ‘impact factor’, i.e. how 11

many times an article is quoted. Of course, articles are read more than they are quoted. However, if we are to evaluate the contribution of a given article to the research it makes sense to look at how many times an article is quoted. In that case, the major publications in our field (ethics and philosophy) have usually an average impact factor between 1 and 2, which means that, on the average, articles are quoted between once and twice every year. The most popular articles in the most prestigious journals are rarely quoted more than five times a year, and they constitute an infinitesimal part of the overall publications. The problem is not recent. In 1990 already, David Hamilton remarked that 55% of the articles published between 1981 and 1985 received no citation at all five years after their publication (Hamilton 1990). (We thank Susan Wright for the reference and pointing this long-run trend to us.)

As one anonymous referee pointed out, there are other problems with over-publication: too much of what is written is 12

not worth reading, and too much is extremely narrow in scope in the sense that it addresses topics that is the concern for a very small group of specialists.

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be avoided and has always been present, it should not be forgotten that academia is also based on

this ideal of cooperation and exchange. With excessive competition, this ideal is cracking.

In daily life, academia looks very much like a rat race where everyone is running to stay at

the same place. A little bit like on a treadmill, or in a hamster wheel. The point here is that if we are

supposed to read everything (or just a reasonable amount) of value that is published in our field, it is

basically impossible. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly difficult due to the rising

requirements for publications. There is a high chance that we will lose track of important

contributions, new developments and occasions to produce better research. Moreover, in order to

publish something, we are forced to ever higher degrees of specialization. So, we end up in highly

specific, tall and narrow ivory towers, with very little knowledge about the forest of ivory towers

surrounding us.

In game theoretic language, researchers are stuck in a problem of collective action. That is,

in the absence of any coordination device or entity that could enforce some basic rules, the result of

the competition is collectively detrimental. Another way to put it is to say that individuals face

incentives not to cooperate, but to defect, i.e. to accentuate the coordination problem, which leads to

suboptimal outcomes. 13

The famous prisoner’s dilemma offers an illustration of this dynamics (Schelling 2006, pp.

216-217). In its more common version, police put in custody two men who are suspected of a

crime. However, they have only solid proof of a less severe offence, not the crime itself. The

suspects are placed in separated rooms and offered a choice between remaining silent or giving

away their accomplice. If both remain silent, both get one year of jail time. If one gives away the

other, while the other remains silent, the first is released while the second gets sentenced to ten

Again, our intention is not to outline how this situation was brought about. The predicament is real enough, no matter 13

what the origins are.

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years. If both give the other away, they get eight years each. The outcomes are shown in the matrix

of payoffs below.

The collectively optimal outcome is (1,1) where each remains silent. Economists call it a Pareto

optimum, i.e. a situation where the situation of one agent cannot be improved without worsening the

situation of another agent, and where no further improvement is possible. However, because ‘not

confess’ is strictly dominated for each individual by ‘confess’ (i.e., no matter what the other player

does, confessing is always better as seen from the point of the individual player), each player has a

strong incentive to confess no matter what he presumes that the other will do. 14

Likewise for academics, the incentive to publish more than competitors is so strong that it

regularly overrides other concerns. As with the prisoners, each academic is stuck in a situation

where she knows that publishing less will be beneficial for her other academic and personal

commitments (as well as for her own well-being). In addition, she is aware that all academics will

be collectively better-off, but she is also aware that her competitors have no incentive to keep their

Player 1 Not Confess

Player 1 Confess

Player2 Not Confess

1,1 10,0

Player 2 Confess

0,10 8,8

The pure strategy of ‘not to confess’ is strictly dominated because, when looking at the payoffs’ matrix from an 14

individual perspective, this option is always outperformed by the alternative strategy (‘to confess’). If player 1 doesn’t confess, player 2 will be sentenced of 1 year in jail if he doesn’t confess but 0 if he does. If player 1 confesses, player 2 will spend 10 years in prison if he does not confess, but 8 if he confesses. In all cases, each player taken individually has a dominant strategy: to confess.

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publications level at a moderate level. In other words, each player in this sort of game has an

incentive to publish more than her competitors.

The situation where most academics are striving for more publications, often regardless of

the induced costs, is then a Nash equilibrium, i.e. a ‘strategy profile in which each player’s strategy

is a best reply to the strategies the profile assigns to the other players’ (Binmore 1998, pp.

100-101). The presence of a Nash equilibrium is important for grasping the dynamics at work in 15

the collective action problem that academics face. The focus is on the notion of equilibrium, i.e. a

situation where, according to Oxford dictionary, ‘opposing forces or influences are balanced’. The

strategy of publishing more than one’s competitors is an equilibrium because it is the best strategy

to adopt for an academic given that other academics have the same strategy. The fact that

generalized defection (i.e. publishing more) is a Nash Equilibrium implies that it is a stable

situation. In the absence of external intervention (e.g., an authority in charge coordination issues) or

deontic constraints (e.g., a moral code), academics (like our prisoners) will not decide to publish

less.

The presence of a Nash equilibrium illustrates that academics are trapped into a collective

action problem. It is because publishing more than one’s competitors is the best strategy, at an

individual level and without considering the broader picture, that academics are trapped into a race

to the bottom. Then, like two lovers who, during an argument, increasingly raise their voice in order

to have the last word and end up screaming at each other without listening, each researcher tries to

publish always more and, in the meantime, increases her risk of not being able to follow what is

published in the field. (Note that this applies even if it is the case that much of what is published is

not worth reading: one has to read it in order to know that!)

See also Martin Osborne’s book on game theory (Osborne 2003, chapter 2). 15

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Our point is the following: when the standard is two publications a year, one will work

more to add an extra publication every year. As such, she will enjoy a competitive advantage for

obtaining a tenure position or additional funding. Figuring out the origin of the competitive

advantage, the others will adjust. So, the competitive advantage quickly vanishes, which

incentivizes the initial player to publish four a year. Again, she will enjoy a short-termed advantage

before the others adjust, and so on. This pattern is socially inefficient since people are investing

more and more resources at the expense of other things (other academic duties than publishing or

private life). Moreover, they individually invest more and more resources with a slight marginal 16

effect: taking for granted that most of people put in roughly the same level of effort, the final result

in terms of differential of performance will remain the same. The more talented will always

outperform the less talented (Heath 2006, p.361). Everyone is struggling for basically remaining 17

at the same place. 18

2. Academic Competition and Social Benefits

Publications are only one category of the benefits that society could expect from its higher

educational system. In that context, the trouble with the increase pressure for publishing is twofold.

Academic competition is not the only case. Other examples include the use of doping products in sports, the wages of 16

key football players, the size of individual houses, the expenses on luxury goods, the value of gifts for birthdays or Christmas, and so forth. For more examples, refer to Robert Frank’s book, Luxury Fever (Frank 1999).

To be clear, this article presumes nothing about the existence, definition and normative value of the concept of talent. 17

It may be the case that the concept is an ‘empty box’ or that it might often encompass anti-social behavior (i.e. overtly selfish, pathologically competitive behavior). The point here is to highlight that even if one attributes to talent a central value in academia, she has strong reasons to worry about the current pattern of competition that expresses through the publication race.

Another example is the competition that took place among the Ivy League universities in the 1950’s regarding 18

American football. Their students invested more and more energy and time in training for no marginal change in terms of competitiveness (evaluated by the number of wins). Why is that? The explanation is that all Ivy League universities adopted the same strategy: increasing training time. It came without any significant improvement, but at the expense of university’s main goal: education. The solution was to cartel among universities for restricting the time spent by students training (Dixit and Nalebuff 1993, pp.225-227).

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It tends to (1) produce inefficiencies and (2) diminish other gains that the academic environment is

supposed to generate. As a result, the current situation is inefficient. Economists call this a

suboptimal situation, which means that other situations exist where larger benefits are possible for

everyone. Or, using the Pareto criterion, there is at least one alternative where the situation of at

least one agent will be improved (by comparison with the current situation) without worsening the

situation of another agent. Nevertheless, because of the prisoner’s dilemma’ shape of academic

competition such improvements are not individually realizable, they need to be addressed by 19

changing the framework within which individuals act. Before developing this idea in the next

section, it is essential to have a clear view on the other social benefits that research and higher

education are meant to produce.

Colleges and most universities have an educational purpose. They are supposed to purvey

good supervision, valuable courses and consistent pedagogical follow-up. They should train and

educate individuals in specific fields. However, if researchers are to be rational, they will see

teaching as a burden (Wright 2009, p.22), time wasted because it is not used on research and…

publications. And, this is what actually happens. In Denmark for instance the most efficient

researchers are often relieved from their teaching duties and the ‘burden’ mostly falls on the

shoulders of young researchers, who need more time for their own research and might not provide

the quality of teaching normally associated with well-established professors..

Speaking about the third social benefit – contribution to the overall society –, why should

we bother writing popular articles, contributing to public debates, organizing conferences accessible

to a large public since these activities will not significantly help us to get a position or gain

recognition from our institution? As a result, society loses a part of its richness and the benefits

In game theoretic language: they are situated outside of the feasible set.19

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produced by universities decline. The gap is widening between researchers in their ivory towers and

the rest of the society. Without advocating the return of the intellectuels engagés of the last century,

it is still plausible to regret the quasi-absence of humanities and social sciences researchers within

the public scene not because they would have the function to rule public debates, but because their

participation may enrich the debates by enlarging the spectrum of available opinions, ideas and

arguments.

As previously mentioned, these inefficiencies highlight a phenomenon that is not proper to

academia: the pathologies of competition. In various contexts, competition is a manner of

structuring human interaction that generates positive outcomes. For instance, market competition

favours innovation, the diversity of supply and decrease in the prices (which explains why cartels

and monopolies are objectionable). Put differently, competition often produces efficient outcomes,

first and foremost for consumers. Competition may be good then, but only under certain conditions.

These conditions are far from trivial. They cover the frame within which competition

should operate for producing positive outcomes (Schultz 2001). They also include the form and

intensity of competition, i.e. how agents compete with each other, the means they use and how far

their competitive behaviour stays limited to the market itself (Applbaum 2000; Heath 2006). Price

competition is a good example for why it may be objectionable to push competition to its limits. As

mentioned, the fact that companies compete through prices carries positive outcomes since

consumers get access to cheaper products. However, there is a point where price competition

becomes problematic: when competitors start to sell below cost. By doing so, they are losing money

and are trying to do one and only one thing: push their competitor out of business. This is not

sustainable in the long run since no one can indefinitely sell below cost. Moreover, when one of the

competitors collapses, its workers are laid off and the diversity on the market is reduced. When only

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one competitor remains, he is in a monopolistic situation, free to set prices at whether level he

wishes, clear from competition (and from the urge to innovate) and able to close the market to

future entrants. Price competition pushed to this extreme is an obvious example of how things can

go wrong, i.e. how competition could, at the end of the day, generate inefficient outcomes that are in

clear contradiction with the social benefits expected from it.

Thus, we do not argue against competition per se, but against its defects.. Not all human

activities are equally compatible with cooperation, or should even to be compatible with

cooperation, and definitely competition is a very efficient way for dealing with a vast array of

activities in industry, trade, sports - and even academia, which diverges from cooperation. But, on

the opposite side, a naive cheerleading of competition induces blindness to its pitfalls and, more

importantly, to ways to correct them. For competition to deliver the goods that society expects it

requires regulation precisely because competition has a tendency, under certain circumstances and

for certain activities, to go astray, i.e. to be inefficient (Lindblom 2002, pp.147-165).

This is precisely the situation faced by academia. Our job as professors is a mixture of

competition and cooperation. However, the recent evolutions in the sector, i.e. the application of

methods coming from the corporate world (Pollitt 1993; Weiler 2000), the emphasis on quantitative

objectives, mostly of publications, the development of performance based evaluations, the shrinking

resources with the obligation for searching, individually, for external funding, have accentuated the

competition side.

In short, even if we do not deal with this macro-issue, the collective action problem that we

are confronted to as researchers stems from the global shift towards a ‘managerial

paradigm’ (Etzkowitz et al. 2000) within academia. Our point may then be understood as affirming

that such evolution may have reached the point where it has become largely detrimental to the

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cooperative dimension of our work and to our role as academics within the society. So, the question

is: how to counter the bad effects of the race for publishing?

3. Caring Less or Regulating More?

Something should be noticed before proceeding: we, as researchers, are part of the general

equation of the degradation of our conditions of work. By trying to stand out from the crowd, we

are raising the requirements for everyone else. We impose costs on each other and this is a

collective action problem since it is our lack of coordination, our eagerness (driven by the

incentives in place) to publish more and more that provokes our difficulty to catch up with the

literature, to stay informed or to devote significant time to other academic activities.

The race is also a race to the bottom in terms of personal flourishing and well-being. What

is rational to do according to our immediate self-interests is thus individually and collectively self-

defeating in the long run. It is a ‘smart for one, dumb for all’ strategy (Frank 1999, p.146). As male

sea-elephants, our rationale response, from an individual perspective, is collectively sub-optimal

and produces large inefficiencies for most of us. The point is important because it helps to

understand that we are not alienated by any kind of broader system of values or manipulated by

some hidden force. The only force at work is us and our short sighted rationality in a context of

distorted incentives.

Despite this responsibility, the role of incentives should be underscored. The bottom-line of

the situation is our rational responses to incentives that accentuate unhealthy patterns of

competition. It might be rightly claimed that, at the end of the day, researchers are not fully

responsible for the situation since it is not them who set up the incentives’ structure, i.e. the rules of

the game. In other words, if the situation is a suboptimal equilibrium – a Nash equilibrium – it has

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probably to do with the institutional context, the rise of New Public Management, the ‘new

commercial ethos’ (Washburn 2005) inside academia and the role of the bureaucracy (Gay 2005).

This aspect is central, especially when reflecting on what should be done. Usually, when a

collective action problem is identified, the immediate advice is to step out of it. Consumerism is a

problem? Consume less or (stop buying), which is the solution advocated by Ad Busters with their

‘Buy Nothing Day’ and ‘Buy Nothing Christmas’ campaigns. Nuclear proliferation is a problem?

Stop producing or even start destroying nukes without waiting for others to reciprocate. Status-

seeking and keeping up with Joneses are a problem? Pay less attention to status and external signs

of success (Botton 2004).

Applied to the issue of over-publication, this advice would conduct researchers to (try to)

be less concerned with their relative position in the publications’ pecking order. But the problem is

that standing out of the competition means to reduce the chance of getting a decent academic

position since the rules of the game, for changing, need to not be followed by all the players. Paying

less attention to publications will never cancel out their importance for our career since the other

researchers will keep abiding by this rationale. It will only make our career less successful and more

uncertain as some of our colleagues, who have decided to devote more time to teaching or their

personal life, quickly noticed. In the existing system this laid-back strategy is not a viable option; 20

just as unilaterally disarming is not a wise move during an arms race. It simply clashes with the

structure of incentives that academics face – to publish more relatively to their competitors –

because this structure of incentives is directly linked to the distribution of rewards – funding and

By the way, it is precisely the situation encountered by most women in academia when they have to step out for a 20

while or slow down the pace because of pregnancy and child rearing. It is one of the most powerful sources of gender inequalities in the sector.

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tenured positions. Again, such strategies are not on the table because publishing more is a Nash

equilibrium.

This point connects with the previous one for generating an apparent paradox: if we are all

materially responsible of the situation (which does not imply any moral responsibility), then we, as

separate individuals, cannot implement any lasting solution since it would imply regulatory powers

that none of us possess. In short, the question “what to do?” should not obscure the question of

“how to do it?”

Without detailing what could be a workable solution (since it would have imposed to

analyse in depth the institutional reforms carried on since the 1980’s in most countries, which is

beyond the scope of this article) , it is worth noting that researchers are trapped into an 21

environment that shares some features with Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature (Hobbes 1651) and its

depiction of the bellum omnium contra omnes (‘War of each against each’). The author of Leviathan

demonstrates that situations where cooperation is impossible due to the strategies adopted by

individuals (which are rational responses to the structure of incentives at the individual level, but

counter-efficient at the collective one) call for the intervention of a supra-coordinative structure

with the power to coerce (a ‘Leviathan’). And this is the collective nature of the problem that argues

in favour of such an entity and against solutions that are based on a simple change of mentality. 22

Despite the absence of a straightforward solution, an option may be to valorize

achievements and contributions other than publications and, thus, to expand the array of criteria for

evaluating the contributions of a given academic. In particular, attention should be devoted to the

The reader interested can refer to a large body of works (Commission on the Social Sciences 2003; Ellison and 21

Eatman 2008; Gay 2005; Newfield 2011; Washburn 2005).

This is the reason why the introduction of market-based solutions within academia worsens the situation by, in the 22

same movement, undermining coordinative devices.

! 17

spillover of academic work and involvement in the society at large (Ellison and Eatman 2008). The

most challenging issue is probably one of measurement. If a multifaceted indicator has to be forged,

how to integrate together quantifiable figures such as publications with more qualitative

components? Whether the difficulties are, if we want to go out of the rat race, we need to seriously

consider this option.

It may be even more desirable inasmuch as more of the universities’ social benefits are

produced through cooperation, and not just competition. So, it advocates for moderating the

importance of publications in the evaluation of individual careers. On this respect, it is difficult not

to recognize that researchers’ cooperation suffers from the race to the bottom. Colleagues regularly

complain that most conferences or workshops are useless for their own agenda. Who has never felt

that the time spent listening to others’ papers takes precious time away from urgent research and

writing? These laments are generated by the rate race. Since the competition is harsh and standards

constantly rising, any time spent doing something else than research is resented as an obstacle for

one’s career.

More cooperation among academics might bring about the more desirable scenario where

fewer better quality articles will be published with lower psychosocial costs and higher social

benefits. Nonetheless, in order to realize that scenario, two conditions should be met. The first

condition is to move away from a common misconception about academic work, sometimes

fostered by academics themselves: the idea of the lonely, secluded genius, developing his or her

ideas alone in silent conversation with books and articles. Academia as a knowledge producer has

always relied on the principle of exchanging of ideas, which is currently undermined by the extreme

competitive behaviour propelled by a heavy reliance on individual production.

! 18

The second condition is to take seriously the collective action nature of the race for

publications. This implies thinking about institutional intervention (universities, ministry, and

government) to change the structure of incentives. It might appear as unsatisfactory, depressing or

both to some readers, but there is no sustainable solution at the individual or departmental levels;

solutions should be global.

4. Conclusion

Our contention is that the combination of the lonely-genius stereotype and the idea that “more

production equals better quality” engenders the fatal belief that incentives should be structured in a

way which “squeezes as much out of those brainy weirdoes (the lonely geniuses) as possible”. Part

of the current rat race flows from this misconception of the academic work and its benefits. And,

this is what the public administration in charge of universities needs to understand and take

seriously into account.

The horizon is quite simple: the pressure for publishing should be, in one way or another,

curbed. Likewise the amount of publications may, if we are lucky, decrease. Because, we truly

believe that a single article, carefully constructed through dialogue and criticism in academic

forums, informed by several points of view and academic (sub-) disciplines could be better, and

contribute more (to both research and the public) than ten highly specialized peer-reviewed articles,

read only by those peer reviewers. Constraining publications may have the effect of increasing the

average value of publications. If not the intrinsic value, at least the increased reception (i.e. the

increased number of readers) will make these publications more useful than those drowned in a

larger flow.

! 19

Again, no solution will be efficient if not carried out at an institutional level. It is the direct

consequence of the fact that the race for publications is, according to us, a collective action

problem. It implies that the proper level for addressing the question of the evaluation of academic

achievements necessarily encompasses the whole research sector, i.e. all universities and

institutions. However, it is very unlikely that it could be reachable in the near future. A more modest

path would be to reform the criteria used for evaluating academics at the level of each university

and lobbying to have such changes implemented at the national and European levels. A first step

may be to impose on universities that depend on public funds or/and where public institutions

determine in part the policy more mixed criterion for hiring professors, to distribute money to

research projects according to their outcomes in terms of publications, but also teaching impact and

contribution to the overall society. 23

But, for sure, no significant change will happen without some profound modifications of

the rules of the game played by researchers . Even if, as individuals, we have become more aware

of the dynamics that lies at the heart of the arms-race we are involved in. Moreover, we would need

to think and theorize about – perhaps experiment with – alternative ways of setting up research

institutions. Without a clear(-er) view about the feasible alternatives, we run the risk of perpetuating

the existing system, with all its drawbacks, out of fear for the unknown.

A last point: expanding the range of criteria will not (and should not) cancel out

competition. It will not suppress the fact that some researchers will fare better than others, but it

might result in an academia with better working conditions, less but more qualified articles and

more collectively beneficial research. Again, nothing in this article has been inspired by abhorrence

of competition. Competition may be good, and often it is. In various cases, it is the salt of life. We

In the last years, some (prestigious) universities, like Harvard, have started to re-evaluate the weight that they confer 23

to teaching to the overall evaluation of their academic staff.

! 20

compete in sports, politics, for mates, recognition, etc. When competing, we develop our skills and

achieve projects that we would have had trouble to achieve otherwise. No doubt about that.

Nevertheless, there is a point beyond which competition gradually loses its raison d’être, a

point where competition becomes indecent because the costs exceed the benefits. This article is

inspired by the conviction that academic competition, when it comes to publications, has reached

this point where large inefficiencies are produced. Of course, if, as we suggest as a part of the

solution, we begin to emphasise teaching and public engagement as meritocratic parameters more

on a par with publications, competition would have to be strictly monitored in these fields. 24

However, we do think that the current national and international standards for the

evaluation of research do not give universities any serious incentive to change the situation. It is

actually quite the opposite. Researchers are pushed to compete more than ever, which often

generate attitudes and professional behavior that are inappropriate, counter-productive and

undermine any cooperative behavior. Naturally, such a situation is not really surprising: it just

confirms that it is a matter of higher political attention.

An anonymous referee pointed this out to us. It is an important point and the fact that we did not identify it ourselves 24

in the first place can be taken as an illustration of just how extremely focused we, as researchers, are on publications!

! 21

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