On Publishing At Least One Paper This Year
Your Thursday Essay 8th January 2026

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Hi Scholar,

If it is agreeable with you, for this year’s first essay we would like to begin with a question.

Is one of the goals you set for yourself this year to publish a paper? Or maybe even two? 

We ask you this question because it is this seemingly banal, unsurprisingly common academic goal – publish a paper this year – that forms the starting point of today’s essay.

On Publishing At Least One Paper This Year

— Written by The Critic and The Tatler

Ever since The Critic began graduate school, ‘publish a paper’ would, without fail, make it onto her annual goals list. However, at the beginning of this year, as she reflected on the kind of scholar she wanted to become and the ways in which she wished to dedicate herself to scholarship, she found that she no longer wanted to place such a goal on her list. Last year, she graduated from her PhD and thereafter decided to leave academia to pursue her own form of scholarship.

On the contrary, this year The Tatler is embarking on a more ‘formal’ route to independent scholarship. It is formal because the objective is to obtain a PhD by 2032. It is independent because he will not be enrolling in an official PhD programme, but instead will pursue a PhD-by-publication. In a PhD-by-publication, one must present a body of published work (that is, peer reviewed journal articles) that when taken together form a coherent, original contribution to knowledge. Following publication of these articles, one needs only to be affiliated with a university for a year. During this period, a 10,000-word covering document – around a tenth of the length of a traditional PhD thesis – must be written, detailing the value of the published body of work and stitching it all together. The university then examines whether this body of work is equivalent to the contributions of a traditional PhD thesis and, if worthy, awards a doctoral degree. Given this need for institutional recognition, publishing papers is therefore of significant importance for The Tatler.

The reason we tell you the tale of these two scholars is to highlight the context in which the goal ‘publish at least one paper this year’ plays out. That context, of course, is the academy. 

And it is for this reason that, in this essay, we must take the academy as our contextual landscape. For it is only within the context of the academy that we can meaningfully think about, question, and challenge our desire to be productive paper publishers. And in doing so, we focus on ‘the academic’ who works within the academy and sets publishing papers as one of their primary academic goals each new year.

‘Who’, then, is this academic? 

For are not questions about what someone does – or what they want to do and achieve – inevitably related to who they are? Are you an academic, dear reader? And if you identify as one, just what kind of person are you? That is to ask: who is the academic as an individual?

Will you permit us to have a stab at answering these questions? Perhaps the answer we provide will not align all too well with your own self-understanding of who you are as an academic. Or perhaps you will find that we have stolen the words straight from your mouth. In any case, it ought to prompt you to reflect on your understanding of your ‘self’ – the self that brought you to the gates of the academy.

So we shall begin.

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