Challenges and Support in Article Publication: Perspectives of Non-Native English Speaking Doctoral Students in a “Publish or No Degree” Context

Abstract

Article publication as a requirement for graduation appears to be the most compelling challenge for doctoral candidates, especially for the non-English speaking ones. In order to contribute to this topic of growing interest, we aimed to investigate the key challenges to doctoral student research publication and develop an understanding of support they needed to ease the publication process. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 non-English speaking doctoral students in varied science and social science programs at an international university in north Cyprus. The findings revealed that the participants supported the “publish or no degree” policy as a condition for their graduation despite several challenges it created for them, such as lack of publication experience, weaknesses in the article composition, tough criteria of journals, and inadequate support from the instructors at the course phase. Peer-support community among the doctoral students lacked in the examined context and promoting it might yield positive results.

The death of tourism scholarship… unless…

“…Unfortunately, recent reports are already showing glimpses of this happening. Some doctoral programs have already imposed a "publish or no degree" policy (Shamsi & Osam, 2022), which withholds doctoral student graduation unless a publishing ransom is paid. Under such pressures, we fear that students may resolve to predatory journals as potential avenues, cut corners in rigor when executing their research, and/or worst still, turn to unethical research practices, such as neglecting ethical human research conduct, unprincipled data manipulation, and plagiarism to accelerate outcomes (e.g., Dolnicar, 2019).…”

Higher Institution Students’ Challenges in Writing Journal Articles: Characteristics and Proposed Solutions

“…The first examines the structure of discussion sections in research articles by Indonesian writers (Arsyad et al, 2020;Hilmi & Afifi, 2021;Arsyad et al, 2021). The second angle explores the challenges students face in writing articles (Lesmana & Ariffin, 2020;Shamsi & Osam, 2022;Purwanto, 2021). The third focuses on discourse studies, analyzing linguistic features in articles by nonnative English speakers published in Englishmedium journals (Martinez, 2018;Alipour & Nooreddinmoosa, 2018;Lathif et al, 2021).…”

Using online machine translation in international scholarly writing and publishing: A longitudinal case of a Chinese engineering scholar

“…These studies draw on such social constructivist theories as academic literacies and situated learning as theoretical frameworks to analyse EAL scholars' challenges, coping strategies and learning in writing and getting published (Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022). Language problems in the writing process (grammatical mistakes, poor vocabulary, lack of conciseness, informal language etc.,; Abdeljaoued & Labassi, 2020; Lei & Hu, 2019; Luo & Hyland, 2019; Mu, 2020; Mur‐Dueñas, 2013; Ramirez‐Castaneda, 2020; Shamsi & Osam, 2022; Uzuner, 2008; Willey & Tanimoto, 2012) and in submission (understanding the rules of the journal, completing the submission procedures, communicating with editors and reviewers etc. ; Mu, 2020; Yuan et al, 2020) were reported most frequently among the challenges.…”