An Investigation of Doctoral Students’ Publication Experiences in a ‘Publish or No Degree’ Context

The number of publications as research outputs has ever since become a critical factor in individuals’ and institutions’ performance measures as well as ranking the universities, leading to the flourish of an extensive number of journals publishing several issues annually. The blooming of publication has made many universities worldwide adopt the ‘publish or no degree’ policy in their doctoral programs, in which the PhD students are demanded to publish one article or more as a requirement for graduation. In spite of its importance in preparing doctoral students as researchers, the ‘publish or no degree’ policy has been reported in several studies as an additional source of ‘pains’ for the doctoral students in their highly challenging endeavor. To this end, the present study aims to investigate the perceptions of stakeholders about the ‘publish or no degree’ policy as a requirement for doctoral students’ graduation, then the challenges encountered by the doctoral students in writing for publication process, and finally the support they receive and/or need in writing for publication process in the context of an EMI (English as a medıum of instruction) university in North Cyprus. The study adopted a sequential mixed method in which the data was triangulated from different participants using different research toolsData analysis indicated that all participants were in favor of the ‘publication condition’ for graduation. However, this condition created a number of challenges faced by the doctoral students: article-related and non-article-related challenges. Article-related challenges were mainly linguistic and genre-related challenges. Although some doctoral students admitted that they received sufficient support throughout their Ph.D. study including the article-writing period, many participants emphasized a shortage in the support provided by their supervisors, faculty, and the university. Furthermore, the findings revealed that there is an urgent need for further support to enhance their publication literacy, such as creating research groups among the doctoral students, and immersing publication in the taught courses. It was also highlighted strongly that making changes in the university’s by-laws by expanding the number of acceptable indexes would open more publication channels and thus the waiting for publication status would be shortened.