Between Volume and Quality in Nigerian Academic Publishing by Moses Ochonu

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

In all fairness, while some academics in Nigeria are outright frauds and enjoy benefitting from their laughable publication number claims, many of those who are guilty of publication inflation and shady publishing practices are themselves victims. 

They're caught up in both a global crisis of scholarly ethics and the absence of a local infrastructure of rigorous research regulation.

Dr. Usman Isyaku has already explained how publication and citation cartels work. 

There are also too many predatory publishers and pay-to-publish for-profit journals that support non-rigorous publishing in a transactional and highly commercialized arrangement that caters to many scholars in the developing world.

The rise of AI-assisted publishing, paid algorithmic citations, paid search engine optimization, etc can generate false scholarly prestige. They're all part of a growing menu of shady academic practice that are being normalized and that have ensnared many naive,  unsuspecting, and promotion- and visibility-hungry scholars.

But in my opinion, much of the problem stems from the NUC's publication requirements/guidelines, which emphasize quantity (number of publications) over quality (rigor, novelty, and depth of scholarship).

The quick caveat of course is that the NUC is not responsible for the sins of a scholar who is obsessed with amassing an inhumanly high publication numbers, not for career advancement but purely for bragging rights and one-upmanship.

A junior colleague in a Nigerian university once asked me to add his name to a paper--any paper--that I was working on so he could get publication credit. Can the NUC be blamed for this? Only to the extent that said colleague was perhaps desperate to meet the NUC's publication number metrics instead of producing quality scholarship.

Another one asked me to add him as an editor of a volume I was editing, saying that he had a paper on the theme to contribute but that he would only contribute if I made him co-editor. Is that the NUC's fault or the normalization and acceptance of poor scholarly ethics?

Nonetheless, the NUC can be blamed for setting the stage for abuse and fraud, even if unintentionally.

If the NUC asks academics to provide 10 published papers to go from one rank to the next, 7 in local journals and 3 in foreign indexed ones, it has inadvertently opened the door to fraud and embellishment.

Academics in the system would simply conform by trying to produce the required number of articles, instead of producing good scholarship that's rigorous, peer-reviewed, and published in credible venues.

The system and its requirements determine how academics structure their work and what and how they choose to publish. After all, existential imperatives dictate that one seeks upward professional mobility and its rewards. And if that comes only though numbers, then obtaining the numbers, by any means, becomes the priority.

What's happening in response to the NUC's number-focused metrics is that academics are gaming the system to publish any and everything, including poorly researched and poorly written papers that would never survive the most lenient peer review let alone be published.

But it is not entirely the fault of the academics. If you create opportunity for fraud and shady practices to thrive and create an enabling environment for people to game your metrics of evaluation, no matter how initially well intended the metrics may have been, most ambitious people who are hungry for promotion and prestige will take advantage of it.

And you discourage rigor and serious, painstaking scholarship.

If I have a manuscript, or even a doctoral dissertation, why should I publish it as a book that my university, following the NUC metrics, is going to count as one publication out of the 10 required for promotion?

That manuscript is probably better off published as a book, a medium that would maximize its impact. Slicing it into many articles published in obscure journals would diminish its impact and merit.

But why should I choose the book path when I can extract up to 20 or 30 papers from said manuscript (with every major section becoming a paper), publish them in non-peer review journals (local and foreign) and even in predatory venues and as book chapters and not only surpass the promotion requirement but have publications/papers in reserve for the next promotion?

And if I have an article draft, why would I spend six months fortifying and revising it to try and get it published in a credible journal whose evaluation process would take two years when I can get said piece published easily within 2 months with minimal or no peer review and with little to no revision?

At a conference in Lagos, one academic bragged that not only did he have enough papers from his doctoral dissertation for his next promotion but that he had papers in reserve from the dissertation that he'd be publishing for subsequent promotions.

One serious academic told me at the same conference that one junior lecturer in his university said he had enough papers in reserve for the promotion requirements all the way to full professor. The papers all stem from his dissertation. 

When he was trying to publish a larger, highly revised chunk of the dissertation in a foreign peer-reviewed journal, his peers and mentors told him that he'd be "wasting" the paper and creating more work for himself, taking much longer to get one publication instead of possibly 5 from the same chunk.

The reason all this is going on is that no one cares about the quality of the papers being published.

Even the requirement about indexing is farcical because many of the predatory journals and pay-to-publish online journals that have proliferated in South Asia and that cater disproportionately to our academics have found a way to get indexed, increasing their attraction to academics in the developing world.

This fraud of amassing bogus publication numbers declines when the academic attains promotion to the rank of full professor, but it does not completely stop.

Why does it not stop?

The answer is simple. When the quest for promotion ends with promotion to full professor, the quest for prestige and praise begins. 

Publication padding and the amassing of meaningless publication numbers through junk publishing becomes about the hunt for local academic prestige.

When a professor hears in the citation of his contemporary that said colleague has 300 published papers and hears the applause that follows, he takes that as a cue to catch up and access the same prestige and applause that has just been accorded his colleague.

Competition for local prestige becomes the drive that sustains the shady publication games beyond the full professor rank, for in Nigerian citation culture, as in the NUC publication metrics, number of publication trumps quality of publication.

So, we have a system that is being subsidized by the NUC metrics of crude bean counting. This opens the door to fraudulent publication practices as academics seek to game the system for their benefits. 

In turn this practice, long normalized, produces a culture of false, vacuous academic prestige that no one dares to call out in an incestuous ecosystem in which many if not most academics are implicated.

It becomes a cycle that feeds on and replicates itself, a real vicious cycle of scholarly malpractice that needs to be broken by the NUC through a complete overhaul of its current numbers-only publication metrics.

The goal of this much-needed overhaul is to prioritize quality over quantity, rigor over numbers.

Finally, I should stress that there are colleagues in the system whose ambition transcends the quest for promotion and who desire global visibility and recognition as serious scholars.

Such people have essentially been operating above or beyond the NUC’s number-centric requirements by publishing well researched and well written articles in prestigious and credible journals. 

They’re choosing the time-consuming path of rigor and peer review to earn and cultivate global scholarly impact and influence and to have their work participate in global scholarly conversations over the path of cheap local career advancement.

They have proven that it is possible to satisfy the NUC’s flawed metric of scholarly standards while producing serious scholarship that would attract organic and credible attention. 

And they do this inspite of the familiar challenges they face as scholars working in Nigeria. These people inspire and impress me immensely.

So, in the end, perhaps it comes down to individual ambition, ethics, and priorities.

( A Facebook post of August 17, 2025

Title by myself.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19cNEs83HZ/)