Failures in academia (3) - the Autumn season: Mid-career

Tells the story of the two most significant career failures in the third stage of my academic career, as well as their unexpected upsides

Anne-Wil Harzing - Wed 11 Nov 2026 08:18 (updated Tue 4 Aug 2026 13:20)

In my January 2020 blogpost Be proactive, resilient & realistic! I talked about the challenges that even very famous academics have faced in their academic careers. Moreover, in our recent article Every Little Action Counts (Harzing & Sathish, 2026), we include being open about our failures as one of the example micro-practices under the “resist a hero narrative” label, in itself a specific representation of the more abstract concept of humility.

Now that I am semi-retired (see Retirement), I decided to “walk the talk” by reflecting not only on my own career failures, but also on the unexpected upsides that were associated with each of them. Whilst I am not claiming that there are upsides to every failure, our failures often represent cross-roads that can help us to reflect more deeply on the best path through the maze of our academic careers.

Before we start though, let’s get one thing straight. I am privileged! I am white and was born in an affluent Western country (the Netherlands) in the 1960s, an era characterized by wide-spread optimism and belief in social and economic progress. My education was largely free; even at tertiary level there were generous grants available for students who – like me – came from families with low incomes, and only a part of these grants had to be repaid. I did two full tertiary degrees, so received these grants for 7.5 years. This seems incredibly generous now but remember that at that time only about 5-10% of 18-year-olds went to university.

This certainly gave me a much easier start in life, but it doesn’t mean that my academic career was universally smooth. That said, I do not claim the set-backs in my career were unique or even particularly dramatic, although some of them – such as my all but failed PhD and my first redundancy – definitely felt like it at the time. However, I sincerely hope my story will help ECRs to realize that things that appear like major problems at the time can also have unexpected upsides, and might even be positive turning points in your academic career.

I will tell my own career story in four seasons: education, early career, mid-career, and late career. Your own challenges, set-backs, or failures will be different or may appear at a very different stage. But I do believe that the four morals that I derive in this white paper have some general applicability. And remember, this is a story about major cross-roads in my career; it is not about the many daily set-backs that we all experience as academics. Here are three universals that you may not be fully aware of:

• Every academic gets rejections all the time; for instance, everyone experiences paper rejections, even editors of top journals see their own papers rejected.
• Everyone has difficult colleagues/collaborators; in fact, you may well be “that difficult colleague” for others. We all have different personalities and preferences.
• Every academic I know feels undervalued in their own university; especially research-active academics often receive far more recognition outside their university than within.

So, with that in mind, please join me on a journey through the seasons. If you want to skip to a particular section, just use the Tables of Contents below. If you are curious about what happened before my academic journey even started see This little girl: message to my younger self.

Failure 5: Lack of career prospects in the UK

After years of part-time and casual jobs, I was very happy to get my first permanent full-time job in the UK. Initially I even had a very reasonable teaching load of three courses, but this increased quite a bit when my “teaching twin” left academia and wasn’t replaced. So, it was not all roses. But I was young and still had lots of energy.

So, I managed to leverage my PhD research and built up a good research profile in three distinct research programs: International HRM & Staffing Policies, HQ-Subsidiary Relationships in MNCs, and Process issues in International Research. As one of the most research-active junior academics I also became the ECR member of the research committee.

I even job-crafted a role as coordinator for international students, combining my research in cross-cultural management with practical sessions on cross-cultural communication skills, as well as advocacy for international students. I supplemented this role with more informal efforts to make (international) students feel at home in their new environment.

So together with my husband I organised monthly international dinners at our home for groups of 20-35 students (see pictures below) as well as a range of trips in the area. We maintained a very extensive website (still online) with information about Bradford and surrounding areas, recipes, pictures etc.

Unfortunately, as it was still a relatively new field, International Business was not very well represented in the journal ranking the university used to evaluate our research performance. Ironically, this was an outdated ranking from the Netherlands in which Economics and Marketing journals ruled the roost. Journal of International Business Studies – now part of a small group of elite journals – was ranked C, the lowest rank for academic journals. Management International Review – now widely ranked just below the elite journals – was ranked D, similar to professional journals. I still remember one of them: Baksteenberichten (i.e. brick news), presumably a magazine for the building trade. Other International Business journals weren’t even on the list, partly because many of them had only been established quite recently. It was clear this would complicate my career progression at the university.

Then, in 1999, I was asked to be part of recruitment panel for a new professor in Marketing. The male academic we ended up appointing had a rather modest publication record for a prospective professor. It also wasn’t too far off my own publication record at the time (remember I was still a lecturer, three rungs below full professor). But his research was in an area that was seen as “sexy” at the time, and the applicant was considered to have “great potential”. At the same time, nobody had even talked to me about promotion to Senior Lecturer or appeared concerned with my career progression at all. So, I didn’t rate my chances of promotion at that institution very highly. Retrospectively, it might have been another case of a male academic being evaluated for their research potential and a female academic having to demonstrate significant actual research output before being promoted.

Upside 5: Journal Quality List and move to Australia

As an ECR member of the research committee, I reasoned that even though it would be hard to address my lack of career progression, at least I could try to do something about the outdated journal ranking. So, I volunteered to collect journal rankings from other universities to substantiate my argument that we really needed to adjust our ranking. I spent an awful lot of time on this, creating a full spreadsheet with all the rankings. Fortunately, the effort wasn’t in vain: I managed to convince the committee to change the list. Then I thought, well… if this helps me, why not see whether it can help others too. So early 2000, I uploaded the list, which I called the Journal Quality List, on my own website that I had just established in 1999.

Now, 26 years later, the list is in its 72nd edition, with 10 different rankings included. Over the years it has attracted an average of 30,000-40,000 page visits a year. It was also regularly cited in journal articles, either as example of journal rankings or as a sampling frame, with a total of more than 300 citations over the years. Most importantly, it has helped many ECRs across the world to make their case for journal quality, going beyond the narrow focus of their own university’s ranking. But it also gave me name recognition beyond my own research field.

However, my lack of career progression also led me to look around for another job in 2000, especially as we were not terribly happy in the UK at the time either. So, we considered a range of other countries, but in the end settled on Melbourne, Australia as our ideal next destination. And lo and behold, a few weeks after we made our decision, a job vacancy for a Senior Lecturer in IB was circulated on the AIB mailing list. This also meant that I was finally promoted to Senior Lecturer, although – because of salary differences between the UK and Australia at the time – I had to take a substantial pay cut. [Note: academic salaries are now substantially higher in Australia than they are in the UK].

This meant that I had a chance to build up my academic career at a research-intensive university, the top university in Australia and one of the top-30 worldwide in Economics & Business at the time. If you are at all curious about working and living in Melbourne, here is some information that I created when I was involved in recruiting new members of staff in 2004: Living and working in Melbourne. It serves as a nice time capsule in itself. My husband and I also had a wonderful time on a personal level, first enjoying apartment city living and then experiencing the traditional large single storey home on a quarter acre block. We even got ourselves an open top car and explored the various landscapes and animals of Australia (see pictures).

Failure 6: Promotions didn’t come easily in Australia either

[This section covers by far the longest and most significant stage of my career. As such, it is much longer than the others. However, if you are at all interested in research evaluation or putting in a promotion application, you may find the extended discussion of the Publish or Perish software and my bibliometric research helpful.]

So yes, I was happy with the belated promotion to Senior Lecturer, and we enjoyed living in Australia. But that doesn’t mean that everything was rosy. For one, I found it hard to adjust and felt rather alone in an International Business group consisting mostly of male Australians; our lunch hours were filled with discussions about Australian politics and sports. I also soon discovered that a big reason for why I was recruited was to fill teaching gaps. So, as a newbie I ended up teaching the courses others didn’t want to teach. In my first 2-3 years I taught new courses every year, and I had to develop all course materials from scratch. My days and weeks were a blur of teaching preparation, class time, and marking. To buy out some of my teaching, I applied for university funding (a generous $AUD25,000), but my Head of Group didn’t allow me to take it as it would create teaching gaps.

As best I could, I still continued to publish in my three earlier research programs and even started two new research programs: Transfer of HRM Practices in MNCs, and Language in International Business & Management. The latter program ultimately led to an all expenses paid week-long visit to Taiwan, the closest I have ever come to feeling like a VIP: business class flights, a hotel room bigger than most Taiwanese apartments, and lots of wonderful meetings, lunches and dinners. Of all my international trips I have the most enduring memories of this once, so I decided to write up my visit restrospectively: Language & HRD: Keynote at Taipei AHRD conference.

After a year or so, I also discovered that – with well over a dozen journal publications in good journals, nearly all single-authored – I outperformed most Associate Professors in the department. But I was told I couldn’t apply for promotion to Associate Professor until I had two full years of teaching under my belt. I was disappointed, but it did make me even more determined to get prestigious external research council grant funding to “show my worth”. I managed to do so, though not in time for my promotion to Associate Professor.

Even so, when I was finally allowed to apply for Associate Professor, my Head of Department indicated it was the strongest case he had seen in the department so far and I got through very easily. Unfortunately, only achievements since the last promotion counted for promotion to full professor. So, I was really happy that, shortly after I was promoted to Associate Professor, I was awarded $185,000 in ARC Discovery Grant funding as a sole Chief Investigator for a 3-year research project. This was the largest ARC discovery grant awarded to a sole Chief Investigator in Business & Management in the previous three years. I also received funding for a 50% relief of duties, which was hardly ever awarded. This allowed me to not only complete the funded research project but also publish an additional 8-10 articles and continue to be heavily involved in service to both the university and discipline.

Moreover, I made a major contribution to leadership in my role as director of the PhD programme with some 75 students, a role I took on shortly after being promoted to Associate Professor. By tightening up the confirmation requirements, introducing two PhD coursework modules, providing significant academic support, and securing funding for conference attendance and fieldwork, I transformed a programme with low timely completions rates into one that was thriving. As one of the mature age students wrote: “the profile, content and tone of the PhD program have been lifted, and along with it, the morale, competence and confidence of the student cohort”.

So, I decided to apply for promotion to full professor after a relatively short interval of only two years. Unfortunately, my application didn’t even make it past the internal screening. In my feedback, I was told I needed one more big publication hit or a substantial increase in citations. At the time the ISI (Web of Science) and its journal impact factor ruled promotion decisions. Unfortunately, many of the – mostly European – journals in International Business were not yet ISI listed. This meant they didn’t have impact factors, and my work was not well-cited in the Web of Science as many citations were simply not counted.

That said, a colleague told me that the main reason I was not allowed to go forward was that the two other (male and older) applicants had weaker records, and that the leadership didn’t want the external panel to compare their record to mine. Was this true? I have no idea, but university politics are ever-present. On the other hand, the internal panel might well have reasoned that with my record I would be promoted the year after anyway. They may also have felt that these colleagues deserved their promotion, as they had been contributing to the university for much longer than I did. In hindsight, I would say that is fair enough. But of course, I was still hurt and did start thinking seriously about leaving the university.

Upside 6: The PoP software and bibliometric research

But I didn’t and instead decided to “fight back” and apply for promotion again the year after. As I already had half a dozen additional papers in progress, two of which in a very high impact journal, this part of the feedback was “covered”. But in order to address my perceived lack of a sufficient number citations, I also needed to find a way show that my citation impact was higher than was apparent in the Web of Science data. This quest led to what is possibly my best-known contribution to the academic commons, the free Publish or Perish citation analysis software.

The Publish or Perish software

Google Scholar had been introduced just a few years before and my citation levels in that data source were much higher. This is because Google Scholar has a far more inclusive coverage, including not only all academic journals, but also books, book chapters and other types of publications. However, its web interface didn’t allow for easy searching for individuals. So, in 2006 my wonderful husband created a little software program for me to draw data from GS and calculate a few citation metrics, including the then just introduced h-index (see also my 2007 white paper: Reflections on the h-index).

Using the software, I was able to demonstrate that far from being low, my Google Scholar citation levels were actually higher than those of all but one of the many professors in the department, as well as all professors in my field in Australia. Ironically, I discovered that this was true even for my Web of Science citations as you can read here: benchmarks for citation performance. The negative assessment of my citation levels in my unsuccessful application the year before might have simply been based on my Head of Department’s accompanying letter who characterised them as “developing”. So, I learned the hard way that you need to include hard evidence in your promotion application! A decade later, my experiences would lead me to write three multi-part blogpost series on developing effective promotion applications.

After including the “hard evidence” of my citation impact, my next application saw me promptly promoted to full professor. And just like with the Journal Quality List, I thought, well if it helps me, it might be able to help others too. So, I uploaded the software on my website too. Now 20 years, 8 major versions and hundreds of minor versions later, it covers nine data sources, has more than two million users and is still free.

The software is used in more than 200 countries, with heavy usage in the USA, India, UK, Philippines, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, France, Australia and Colombia. For more information about PoP usage over the world, academic levels, and the years, see: The changing usage of Publish or Perish over the years: where, why, when, what & who?. The software has also had extensive press coverage and is mentioned on more than 2,000 library pages. Ironically, it has also become my most cited “publication”, with nearly 2500 official citations in Google Scholar. Additionally, nearly 10,000 academics have used it in their academic articles without referencing it in the list of references.

Over the years, Publish or Perish also expanded from a “h-index calculator” to a versatile bibliometric tool and I published three guidebooks helping users to make the most of the software. The latest 375-page guide shows you not only how to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches, but also how to use the software for a wide variety of purposes. This includes tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers, examiners, or keynote speakers, preparing for a meeting with your academic hero, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, doing bibliometric research and much much more. If you find Publish or Perish useful, you can support it here: Support PoP.

From 2008 onwards I gave many presentations about Publish or Perish and the role of Google Scholar in a more inclusive measurement of academic impact. The first of these was at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, speaking next to Anthony van Raan and Charles Baden Fuller (see picture above). Looking at the presentation now (full hand-out available here courtesy of my host Wilfred Mijnhardt who was able to unearth it from his records) I am surprised at how relevant it remained. I could give the same presentation today and it would still be news to many in the audience. As a bonus the slides include lots of lovely pictures of Australia, making it both a professional and personal memory. What I found most interesting though is that even nearly 20 years ago I already cautioned the audience that “Our aim should be to conduct good scholarship, not to publish in good journals”.

My work with the Publish or Perish software also led me to be invited for the 2013 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. I had a discussion with the development team for Microsoft Academic, one of the data sources we would later support in Publish or Perish before Microsoft sadly decided to discontinue it late 2021. The top left picture above showed the hotel lobby in which our discussion took place. Of course, I also went to the main event of the summit at which Bill Gates was interviewed (top right). But to be honest the main attraction for me was exploring Seatle, my favourite was the Chihula Garden and Glass (bottom left), which combined peaceful gardens with stunningly beautiful glass sculptures. I also enjoyed a cruise on the waters of Elliot Bay where I snapped the bottom right-hand picture. Not bad for the limited camera I had back then.

Bibliometric research on data sources and metrics

The confluence of the creation of the Publish or Perish software and becoming Research Dean led me to combine my international management research with a full research programme in Scientometrics: the analysis of scientific metrics/indicators, which made up the bulk of my new, sixth, research program on Quality and Impact of Academic Research (other research areas within this program were editorial board diversity and referencing accuracy).

I published fifteen articles in the field’s main journals: Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Overall, my interest in bibliometrics was mainly focused on individual academics and how their professional lives are affected by it. I was strongly motivated by a desire to "emancipate" the Social Sciences and ensure bibliometrics properly reflected their specificities and to help academics who feel lost in the new world of metrification. Over the years I:

1. Introduced and legitimised new data sources (Harzing & van der Wal 2008/2009; Harzing 2013/2014/2016/2019; Harzing & Alakangas 2016/2017a/2017b) and new metrics (Harzing, Alakangas & Adams 2014; Harzing & Mijnhardt 2015) that were more responsive to both disciplinary and career stage differences.
2. Held the Web of Science to account on their Science-centric (Harzing 2013) and Anglophone (Harzing 2015) bias [press coverage in the Times], and Elsevier/Scopus on their poor quality control (Harzing & Kroonenberg 2017/2019) and inaccurate field normalisation, causing the disciplinary Times Higher Education rankings to become unreliable (work in progress).
3. Promoted a critical approach to research evaluation, focusing on quality over quantity (Harzing 2005), societal impact over journal hits (Adler & Harzing 2009) [2009 best paper and decade award], and understanding predatory journals (Harzing & Adler 2016).
4. Created ranking literacy through “investigative blogging”, such as an Australian productivity boom (or just a database expansion)? and Forever Young: the problematic measurement of age in the THE Young Universities ranking.

I am proud that, as an outsider to the field, I am on the editorial board of Scientometrics, and my 2016 article is the 8th most cited (on a cites/year basis) article in Scientometrics since its inception in 1978. This article also led to an invitation for a high-profile workshop in Spain, where I presented alongside key bibliometricians. There are no pictures of the event, but there is a still of the video above; a playlist of the entire event is here.

Moral 3: Failed progression may lead to tangible outcomes for others

My mid-career stage was a time where I felt I was doing “all the right things” and had cultivated a nice set of feathers. But no matter how prominently I displayed them, I felt they weren’t really recognized by my institutions. In hindsight though I am grateful for the failed progression, both in the UK and in Australia. They led to important tangible outcomes – such as the Journal Quality List and the Publish or Perish software – that made a significant contribution to the academic commons.

Moreover, my research and practice in research evaluation led to significant name recognition. Most academics I meet know me from my work in the quality and impact of academic research, rather than my five research programs in international management. I doubt any of this would have happened if my career progression had been smoother.

Other posts in this series

• Failures in academia (1) - the Spring season: Education
• Failures in academia (2) - the Summer season: Early career
• Failures in academia (3) - the Autumn season: Mid-career
• Failures in academia (4) - the Winter season: Late-career

Related video

Related blogposts and webpages

• My narrative career write-up
• My current passions
• Retirement
• Quality and Impact of Academic Research
• Transforming Academia
• Reflections on staff development
• REF, rankings & reputation
• Research Impact 101
• Supporting Early Career Researchers
• Supportive, inclusive & collaborative research cultures
• CYGNA - 11+ years of supporting women in academia