What we do and what we don't: Paradoxes of academic writing for publishing Pressure on academics across the world to publish is getting ever higher. A number of European universities nowadays require PhD researchers to have publications before they complete their research and defend their theses. Junior staff on contracts, tenure track or not, have publishing norms the fulfilment of which is decisive for keeping a job in academia. Mid-tier and senior staff are required, and expected, to lead the publishing rush. How-to-publish-in-quality-journals seminars are held with journal editors and well-published authors who dispatch (sometimes contradictory) advice to anxious future and present academics. Emails from departments and university management every now and then remind academics just how much institutional prestige depends on the staff's publications, and end-of-the-year tables are sometimes forwarded to all staff showing the number of points each has earned through publications. And then not just any publication, but pieces in international A-journals. International often means European and North American, and very often English language journals. A-journals means 'high quality' (thus not B, C or D) and this is often measured by the 'impact factor', relating to citations of the journal articles. A number of good quality journals that, for example, cater to a mix of practitioner-and activist-researchers rather than only academics, seldom find themselves on A-lists. Not many journals outside Europe and North America are to be found there either. 1 Where does this situation leave researchers and academics? Many PhD researchers try to publish sections of their theses while still writing the whole thing. And while specific sections of a thesis might be brilliant, whoever has done a PhD research knows how we return to the previous chapters, written months back, to amend, enrich or change our analyses and even our conceptual tools in light of new insights. How differently we would have looked at the same reality five years after the defense, or how differently we would have written about it. For those already in academia, the requirement to publish one or two papers a year might look like a piece of cake to those not familiar with the task. But few are those who can keep a steady rhythm of good papers through the years. Writing is not a scheduled activity. It comes in waves, carried by inspiration, but even more so by time-hours and days and weeks and months-free for writing. With everything that academics do, writing time is always wanting, stolen from sleep, weekends, holidays. .. Sabbatical for writing does not even exist at many universities, or comes only many years in between. So sometimes a year or two might pass without a publication, only for a text or two, or a bulk of them, to accumulate in a (relatively) short span.