Lenka Vochocova

“How to get published”, “make your article discoverable”, “what do search engines look at?” – as part of their submission guidelines, SAGE helps us learn how to be recognized by search engines, which are “using secret complex mathematical algorithms that change every month”¹. Nothing wrong with that – until you start to think about how much your ability to fulfil the rules that lead to the greatest visibility of your article to such capricious engines influences the likelihood to be published at all. Sarcasm aside, the search engines are doing a great job in an environment where the journals are flooding the scholarly community with an abundance of interesting articles, while we continue to produce a glut of them for the journals. And we keep producing. Mainly because we are forced to by our universities, because we promised to perform when signing our contracts. Because we all know that it’s all about money. Or do we simply enjoy the race? The hierarchies?

After a few years or decades in academia, you can’t help but think in your weak moments that it’s rather a specific skill to sell yourself, to make yourself visible and to stick to the predefined rules that make you successful in the hierarchy, rather than aspiring to academic excellence, new perspectives or outstanding thoughts. This knowledge (or suspicion) does not prevent us from playing the game. You can observe it at some conferences and in different international projects – how clubs are formed around those who are most successful, and how unrecognizable those who are not so successful, and their work and thoughts, are for those on the top.

In my brightest moments I cannot but laugh at all these hierarchies we build in our heads. But more often, all the haste and lack of interest in each other’s work becomes just annoying and demotivating. Don’t get me wrong, I know the good that peer feedback can do in academia. But I also know how the constant need to judge others and to be judged, in our case in the frame set predominantly by the most successful publishers in the field and their rules helping you to get recognized (by the search engine!), prevents us from remaining creative and curious, from seeing the potential in difference, in alternative thoughts, in the ideas of those who are considered less performing. We have just become too used to thinking in patterns; conventionally, we have learned to take into consideration which research strategy or topic can be successful and which of them have no chance in the system.

As a scholar whose work is mostly related to critical theory, I wonder how and whether at all we can remain sensitive towards all the inequalities constructed and reinforced through communication and the media, while simultaneously cherishing the hyper-competitive, performance and success-oriented environment in an age in which people are burning out and breaking down as a result of their chase for careers. Will individuals competing for publications with the highest impact factor, for the best abstract of the conference or for the most recognizable academic career make us, as a field, more reflective of the important societal changes or will it help us cultivate new ideas?

If so, maybe it is worth the sacrifice. But would we not benefit much more, both individually and as a collective, from taking a break from time to time, despite all the pressures in neoliberal academia, to meet for deeply focused, respectful, non-hierarchical discussions or workshops in which we would judge (if necessary) each other based on the quality of our thoughts and freshness of our ideas, instead of on our academic (celebrity) status? What if we, even if just for a moment, stopped comparing the size of… our h-indexes? Because there are so many more thrilling things to do in our field.

¹ https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/help-readers-find-your-article