When I use a word . . . “Publish or perish”: collocates reflect attitudes

Collocates and collocation

In linguistics, collocation is the habitual and recurrent juxtaposition of words with particular other words.1 The word comes from the Latin verb collocare, to put someone or something, in this case a word, in the same place as another. A corresponding noun, collocatio, means an arrangement or ordering of physical objects.

Collocation therefore involves putting words or terms together in juxtaposition, usually in pairs. In some cases collocation involves opposites: to know the difference between right and wrong, to go to and fro or back and forth, to state something in black and white. In these phrases the words are indissolubly linked and the order is also fixed; we don’t talk about going forth and back, for example. In other cases the collocates, the words that are associated with each other, are natural companions. Examples include raining cats and dogs and to beat someone black and blue. In the first case there is an obvious association between the two types of domestic animal, although what they have to do with the weather may not be immediately clear. In the second case the colours invoked are those likely to result from the beating in question.

Collocations also feature in terms of assemblage, such as an abomination of monks and a murder of crows. I have elsewhere discussed some medical examples2:

• a hive of allergologists;

• a bag of anaesthetists;

• a corps of anatomists;

• a colony of bacteriologists;

• a rash of dermatologists;

• a plague of epidemiologists;

• a movement of gastroenterologists;

• a smear of gynaecologists;

• a lump of oncologists;

• a brace of orthodontists;

• a host of parasitologists;

• a body of pathologists;

• a pile of proctologists;

• a complex of psychoanalysts;

• a joint of rheumatologists;

• a congress of sexologists.

For clinical pharmacologists, I suggested that possible collocations were a concentration or, perhaps better, an interaction.

Other medical collocations include chest and heart, as in the association of that name, from the close anatomical and physiological connections between the two, and dilatation and curettage (D&C), because you can’t do one without first doing the other.

The idea of verbal collocation was first formally expounded in 1951 by the linguistics expert John Rupert Frith (1890–1960), in a paper that was originally published in a journal called Essays and Studies, and later republished in a collection of his essays.3 He did so at first in the context of Edward Lear’s limericks, pointing out that Lear generally preceded the word man with the word old: “There was an old man of …….” On the other hand lady was more often collated with young, while person could be collocated with either young or old. Firth then extended his analysis to the poetry of Algernon Swinburne and then to 18th century letters, such as those exchanged between Samuel Johnson and the Earl of Chesterfield.

The study of collocates has been simplified by the availability of large computerised databases containing samples of written and spoken texts from a wide range of sources, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, fiction and non-fiction, and transcripts of lectures and broadcasts. One such database that I have often used is the British National Corpus (BNC: https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc), which contains over 100 million words of text.

The BNC tells us that the top 10 collocates of the adjective “medical” in the database, in terms of frequency, are treatment, profession, research, care, staff, British, officer, council, practice, and services, all but one of which (British) can be qualified by the adjective. The collocates of the noun “medicine” are less homogeneous—the top 10 are health, veterinary, alternative, law, complementary, science, modern, tropical, university, and traditional; six of these are adjectives describing types of medicine (i.e. medical practice), while the other four are topics that are sometimes associated with it. None treats the word in the sense of a medicinal product, i.e. a medicine. Not until we reach the 37th collocate in the list does that sense emerge, the collocate being bottle.

However, the noun “drug” has collocates all but one of which (alcohol) imply the adjectival use of the word in the sense of a medicine: use, users, abuse, trafficking, alcohol, addiction, traffickers, administration, taking, and treatment.

And I was pleased to see that the second most common collocate of pharmacology is clinical.

Collocates of “publish or perish”

I have defined the term “publish or perish” as “An aphorism that describes the pressure on an academic to have innovative scholarly material published in reputable journals or other forms of scholarly output, sufficiently often, in order to avoid demotion, dismissal, failure to progress in one’s scholarly career, or diminishing the status or reputation of one’s scholarly community or discipline.”4

The BNC includes only three examples of the use of “publish or perish” as a phrase, too few to establish its common collocates. I have therefore taken a different approach to finding them, by conducting a systematic review, looking in the usual databases and elsewhere for the phrase in published papers and books.

I have found 420 papers in which the term “publish or perish” occurs as such or in which the two words are closely associated. Of those, I was able to obtain copies of 388.

In 70 cases the term was used in reference to a software programme by Anne-Wil Harzing called “Publish or Perish” (https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish), which, as the website states, “is designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations.”

In three cases the papers described a game “The Publish or Perish Game,” devised by Max Bai, a social psychologist, in which “A player wins by racking up more citations than the competition, even if that means engaging in a little light plagiarism.”5

In 88 cases the authors of the papers had used the aphorism purely as a slogan, without discussing it in the paper, instead dealing mostly with problems that researchers face when seeking publication or occasionally the problem faced by journals.

I have left three other cases to the end.

That left 224 papers in which I was able to find collocates of the aphorism. I classified them as either beneficial, i.e. supportive of the idea, non-judgmental, moderately critical, or highly critical. Here is the breakdown:

• five papers considered the idea potentially beneficial; they used terms such as “good” and “worth doing”;

• 136 instances of 31 non-judgmental collocates: adage, aphorism, approach, arena, attitude, challenge, concept, context, criterion, culture, doctrine, end, environment, era, ethic, landscape, law, legend, maxim, narrative, paradigm, phenomenon, philosophy, phrase, policy, principle, proposal, reality, rule/s, sentiment, and world;

• 19 instances of nine moderately critical collocates: arbitrary expectation, dictum, dilemma, expectations, incentive/s, mandate, syndrome, then, and trite;

• 64 instances of 29 highly critical collocates: admonition, and, and still, and yet, arms race, but, compel, complexities, cost, banish, desperation, dragon, driving force, hole, imperative, infamous, mantra and cliched mantra, mentality, mindset, negative phenomenon, no more, not, peril/s, pressure, quantity over quality, rhetoric, victim [of], and warning.

Thus, there were more non-judgmental than critical responses to the aphorism. Furthermore the times during which the different categories of term have appeared are different: the median dates on which the collocates were used were as follows:

• highly critical 2008;

• moderately critical 2016;

• non-judgmental 2021.

This suggests that over time authors writing about the “publish or perish” doctrine seem to have become more non-judgmental and less critical about it, either because they have become truly less critical or, as I believe, have become resigned to it.

Inversions

The cases that I have left to the end are three papers whose authors have amusingly inverted the aphorism, as “perish and publish” or “perish then publish.” One case referred to “the implicit support and credibility that professional publications give to organ procurement policies” in relation to the use of non-heart-beating cadaver organ donation.5

The other two dealt with the literal matter of perishing and then publishing, i.e. posthumous publication, a topic that raises several ethical problems.6 One dealt with a specific case, that of Thomas Harriot, an astronomer, who formulated the sine law of refraction of light, his description of which was found in an unpublished paper long after he had died in 1621, and Willebrord Snellius, a Dutch astronomer, who discovered the sine law, in 1621 but also died without publishing it.7 In the end, it was René Descartes who first published the sine law in 1637. The other paper was a review of the posthumous publications of a large number of authors.8

Now I’m not sure whether it’s preferable to publish in order to avoid perishing academically or to perish first and let others do the publishing on your behalf.