Nothing but publishing: the overriding goal of PhD students in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau

ABSTRACT

Publication pressure is perceived to be filtering down into doctoral education worldwide. We explore the causes and effects of the perceived centrality of publishing among doctoral students, emphasising the impact of publication pressure on students’ identity trajectories. We draw on a qualitative analysis of 90 mainland Chinese doctoral students at universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. We find that the credentialisation of publications in the increasingly competitive and publication-dominant academic labour market results in publishing-centred doctoral journeys. Our key finding is that the centrality of publishing affects every aspect of identity trajectory development: it causes doctoral students to commodify knowledge production, devalues coursework, conference participation, and teaching assistantships, encourages students to regard their supervisors as publishing facilitators and their peers as rivals rather than collaborators, and marginalises engagement with external stakeholders. In discussing these dimensions, we emphasise the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates’ abilities and honours in academic recruitment and call for policies to curtail the overemphasis on research output in academic evaluations.

KEYWORDS:

• Publishing during the PhD
• publication pressure
• identity trajectory
• doctoral education
• academic career
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Source: National Bureau of China (2021) China Statistical Yearbook 2021: Number of students of formal education by type and level (2020).

2 Data retrieved from the Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong (https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/EIndexbySubject.html?pcode=B1010123&scode=370), and the Statistics and Census Service, Macau (https://www.dsec.gov.mo/en-US/Statistic/Database). The Hong Kong statistics include students enrolled in Master of Philosophy programmes, but these represent only a marginal percentage of the total.

3 The quotes from the interviewees are identified by three characteristics of relevance: the higher education system where they were doing their PhDs (Mainland China (MC), Hong Kong (HK), and Macau (MO)), the academic areas of those PhDs (HP – hard pure, HA – hard applied, SP – soft pure, and SA – soft applied), and their current year of study in the doctoral programme.

4 Italicised words and phrases in quotes were originally expressed in English.

5 Because of their economies, Hong Kong and Macau have few available jobs for PhDs in the non-academic sector. The academic job market in Hong Kong is highly competitive and global, and local PhD graduates tend to be at a clear disadvantage; in Macau, the higher education system is small, and its universities seldom have vacancies for tenure-track positions (e.g. Postiglione and Jung 2017).

6 In this process, a more robust peer review process in academic recruitment may replace the coarse research evaluation model of evaluating research based on the journal in which it is published.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong SAR: [Grant Number 17604119] and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant number 71974004].