The indexed-conference treadmill: what publication incentives are doing to faculty research in India

Ask a faculty member at an Indian engineering college what her research goals are this year, and the answer often sounds like a checklist: two Scopus-indexed papers, one conference paper in a Springer series, perhaps a Q1 journal if time permits. The questions behind the papers, such as what problems they solve or who benefits, tend to come second.

This is not a complaint about individual researchers. When institutions reward publication counts more visibly than the development of knowledge, researchers adapt rationally, and the research system may suffer as a result. Everything that follows is a consequence of that one dynamic.

How the checklist took over

Indian academia runs on counted outputs. Promotion schemes, postdoctoral fellowships, accreditation reviews and institutional rankings all ask for publications, and increasingly for publications in indexed venues. The intent is sound: a visible quality bar that does not depend on personal connections.

The result is a growing dependence on indexed conference proceedings as a means of meeting publication targets. Many conferences are organised by serious researchers and offer genuine value: a deadline, a community, feedback and a publication pathway measured in months rather than years. The problem is not the conference format itself, but what happens when the need to produce a countable output begins to determine the pace and direction of research.

For a faculty member with a full teaching load, the predictable deadline is often the only rhythm that fits. Sustained journal research can take a year or more through review and revision, with no guarantee at the end. A conference offers a date. Choosing the date is the rational choice, and when thousands of faculty make it, the system as a whole drifts.

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What gets crowded out

First, depth. Sustained research often creates room for a second experiment, a harder baseline, or a failure case nobody expected. When the clock is set by a submission deadline, papers tend to go out when the first result looks presentable, not when the question has been answered.

Second, follow-through. A problem pursued over three or four years can become a real contribution. But when each paper is a checkbox, the next one tends to start somewhere new. I have seen researchers, myself included, left with a string of connected ideas that never matured into the single strong piece they deserved.

Third, honest negative results. A result that did not work rarely counts toward a target, though it is often the most useful thing a colleague could read.

Fourth, mentoring. Students learn from what their supervisors reward. If research becomes a race to meet publication deadlines, they learn to reproduce that race.

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The hidden workload

Most faculty members doing this work are also teaching, setting question papers, handling accreditation paperwork, running student programmes and writing grant proposals. Proposals can consume weeks of effort, and unsuccessful applications do not always provide enough feedback to help researchers improve their next submission. At many smaller institutions, dedicated grant-support staff may be limited.

Cost matters too. Many open-access journals charge article processing fees, and a college without a publication fund or a waiver arrangement leaves the author to pay personally or look elsewhere. The venue is then chosen by what can be afforded, not by where the work fits best.

In that setting, research time is the scarcest resource, and the checklist decides how it is spent. A faculty member with two free weeks will choose the venue with a clear deadline and a high chance of acceptance. That choice is entirely understandable.

What could change

None of this requires abandoning metrics. Counting outputs is how a very large system keeps itself honest. But a few adjustments could shift the incentive from volume towards depth.

Assess the research programme, not only the list. Evaluation panels could ask a faculty member to describe a question pursued across several years, with the papers, negative results and revisions that came with it, alongside publication counts.

Recognise substantive follow-up work. A paper that meaningfully extends, tests or corrects earlier research should be recognised for its new contribution, including when it builds on the author's own work. Evaluation should reward genuine advances rather than simply favouring novelty of topic. This does not mean rewarding duplicate publication or splitting one study into minimally different papers.

Build research time into workload planning. Institutions can formally recognise journal revision cycles, so that a long submission is not a personal sacrifice. Even a modest reduction in non-teaching duties during review periods would help.

Provide shared support. Statistical advice, computing resources and help with grant writing would let faculty at smaller colleges do more with the time they have. So would a modest institutional publication fund, or waiver and read-and-publish arrangements with publishers, so that venue choice rests on research fit rather than ability to pay. Many strong ideas are limited by infrastructure and cost, not talent.

Credit reproducibility. Evaluation criteria that value shared code, datasets and honest reports of what did not work would encourage science that others can build on.

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A question for institutions, and for us

I do not think the answer is to blame conferences, journals or indexing systems. They respond to what the community asks of them. The question is what we, as faculty and as administrators, ask of ourselves.

If the aim is more papers, the current system is working well. If the aim is better questions, answered carefully and used by someone beyond the next review committee, we may need to change what we count.

For researchers early in their careers, I would offer one practical suggestion: keep one question that matters to you, and give it time, even while the checklist continues around it. For institutions, I would ask them to build in room for that question.

Research in India has enormous energy and talent. What it needs now is patience in how that energy is measured.

(Dr. V. G. Prasuna is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Dean (Research and Development) at Satya Institute of Technology & Management (SITAM), Vizianagaram, Andhra Pradesh. Her research interests span artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and cybersecurity.)

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