Publish or Perish: Are CNS Publications the Only Currency in Academia?

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The contemporary research landscape is divided by a deep gap in priorities: while students value teamwork and real-world impact, the institutional machinery remains tethered to a “Publish or Perish” culture. This system, which was once meant to motivate researchers, has devolved into a systemic distortion of scientific values. Success is no longer measured by the contribution to the global knowledge, but by the raw volume and prestige of publication outputs.

This distortion is rooted in the disproportionate power of high-impact journals like Cell, Nature, and Science. By focusing only on these journals, we reinforce a power imbalance where citation-based metrics, specifically the h-index, reward established scientists who already have the resources to keep publishing high-visibility work. In this loop, work like teaching and mentoring gets pushed aside, leaving us with a system that values prestige more than actual progress.

This system is unsustainable for a healthy research environment; alternative metrics that capture the full scope of an academic’s work are now a necessity. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), backed by nearly 25,000 signatories, and the Leiden Manifesto provide the groundwork for moving beyond the impact factor (Hicks et al., 2015). Yet, despite the availability of tools to track policy influence and social engagement, the citation-based h-index remains the primary metric.

The G+ Index: Measuring Good Things in Scientific Practice

To address these structural issues, educational psychology researcher Kelly-Ann Allen has proposed the G+ Index (Allen, 2025). The G stands for generosity, giving and the positive academic work that standard metrics usually ignore. Instead of just counting citations, the G+ Index evaluates researchers across four main areas to encourage a healthier and more collaborative scientific community:

  • Mentorship: For senior academics, the index quantifies generosity through formal mentorship. This is measured by the number of first- or last-author papers co-authored with early-career researchers.
  • Collaboration: The score evaluates the reach of a researcher’s network, including co-authorship across different institutions, countries and disciplines. Critically, it rewards engagement with policymakers, industry partners, community organizations and individuals with lived experiences relevant to the research.
  • Service: The G+ Index values work that bridges the gap between theory and practice. This includes: publishing in practice-based journals to reach professional communities, making editorial and peer-review contributions for scientific journals and working for scientific societies.
  • Open Science: The index encourages transparent practices like data-sharing, replication studies and pre-registering protocols. It further rewards public outreach through podcasts, blogs and media contributions.

By formalizing these metrics, the G+ Index redefines impact: instead of just counting citations, it measures a researcher’s real-world contribution to the community.

Furthermore, the G+ Index is designed to keep individual scores private, shareable only with funding bodies and institutions for specific evaluation purposes. This mechanism puts control back in the researchers’ hands, shifting the focus from public competition to personal development.

At the institutional level, however, transparency is the goal. Universities and research centers would publish their aggregate G+ scores. These data allow prospective staff and students to evaluate an institution’s workplace culture and values before committing their careers there.

Funding bodies and institutions have to lead this transition by providing the infrastructure and incentives required for adoption, while the academic community needs to agree on the specific metrics that define a healthy workplace.

However, the G+ index is also vulnerable to box-ticking. Mentorship or cross-disciplinary collaborations could become superficial exercises intended to inflate a score.

To maintain the integrity of the G+ Index, the system would rely on modern safeguards like AI-driven network analysis and advanced bibliometrics. Artificial intelligence can identify superficial co-authorships, ensuring that only real collaborations are rewarded. Organizations such as the League of Scholars (based in Sydney, Australia) are already pioneering bibliometric approaches that evaluate specialized expertise and collaboration patterns, providing a high-resolution view of professional networks.

Conclusions

The academic community needs to move past its citation obsession. Aligning professional rewards with actual academic values is necessary to keep science functional. The G+ Index offers a roadmap toward a more generous and transparent academic culture. Given how much the plant community relies on interdisciplinary work (spanning genetics, ecology and climate policy) and public environmental impact, plant science institutions should pilot this approach. By valuing mentorship and collective progress over individual citation counts, we can build a scientific culture that supports its people.

 

References

Kelly-Ann Allen. Move beyond ‘publish or perish’ by measuring behaviours that benefit academia. Nature 638, 861 (2025). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00563-9

Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L. et al. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520, 429–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a

 

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About the Author

Emma Olmi

Emma is a PhD student at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and a 2026 Plantae Fellow.  Passionate about plant science and molecular biology, she investigates how plants recover from submergence and cope with a combination of biotic and abiotic stresses. Outside the lab, Emma enjoys hiking, knitting cozy sweaters and singing. Find her on Bluesky: @olmiemma.bsky.social.