From "Publish or Perish" to publishing with impact

Traces PoP’s origin story and its changing usage over the years. Reflects on how to measure and improve our citation impact, and on the need to broaden our conception of both impact and the nature of academic careers.

Anne-Wil Harzing - Mon 3 Aug 2026 14:09 (updated Mon 3 Aug 2026 16:54)

© Copyright 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. First version, 3 August 2026.

Publish or Perish – describing the pressure academics feel to publish in order to succeed in their academic careers – is probably one of the best-known aphorisms in academia. However, it is also the name of a software program for citation analysis that I have offered as a free download on my website since 2006. It has “gone viral”. In a Google search it now occupies the top two of the first three search results for the term, the third being Wikipedia.

In a way the name of the software program – chosen as a recognizable tongue-in cheek pun on academic practices – has always been a bit of a misnomer. As a citation analysis program Publish or Perish (PoP) traces the (citation) impact of our research. Hence, rather than seeing the published paper as the final destination of our scholarship journey, the software encourages us to focus on the impact of our papers, although in the relatively narrow domain of citation impact.

This white paper traces PoP’s origin story and its changing usage over the years. However, it also reflects on how to measure and improve our citation impact, and on the need to broaden our conception of both impact and the nature of academic careers. It was inspired by the insightful questions posed by Mario Pagliaro, Research Director at Italy's National Research Council. My answers were meant to be integrated in an academic article. However, as my responses were so elaborate, this idea didn’t work out as planned.

Even so, Mario’s questions gave me a perfect opportunity to reflect on these topics in time for PoP’s 20^th anniversary in October 2026. So, with his permission I have transformed them into a white paper. If you’d like to skip directly to a specific section, you can use the Table of Contents below.

Table of contents

Why did you create Publish or Perish?

Mario Pagliaro: Since 2006, Publish or Perish has helped scholars worldwide to make their case for citation impact and include standardised metrics in their job, promotion, or funding applications. What brough you, a management scholar, to create the software?

Yes, this is something that puzzles many PoP users when they discover that I am a management scholar, or more specifically an International Business scholar. There are two answers to this question, and I suspect both might be a little surprising to most academics.

First, I didn’t actually develop the software; my husband – David Adams – did. After doing BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Operations Research, David worked as a university lecturer for a short while. But he soon decided that he preferred to watch academic life from a safe distance. Instead, he focused on building up Tarma Software Research, the software development company he founded. So, David is the actual brains behind the software and – as an ever-curious innovator – is also the driving force behind the continuous expansion of the software’s features over the years, as well as its extensive online user manual.

That said, I have been heavily involved in creating training materials for the software, including three books (Harzing, 2010, 2016, 2023b, see the images at the start of this white paper and Using the Publish or Perish software). I also deal with any technical support requests related to the practical use of the software or its data sources. Moreover, over the years I have been the “face” of the software, and many know it as Harzing’s Publish or Perish. In that role, I have given dozens of presentations on the use of Publish or Perish and on Google Scholar as a data source.

Finally, using the PoP software I started doing bibliometric research and published some fifteen articles in the field’s main journals: Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. My research interests in this field reflected my very practical motivation to help academics who felt lost in this new world of metrification. But I also wanted to draw attention to the disciplines that were underrepresented in bibliometric research: the Social Sciences and Humanities. As such, I conducted research that legitimised a wider variety of data sources (see e.g. Harzing, 2008, 2013 and research metrics (see e.g. Harzing, Alakangas & Adams, 2014 [see below]; Harzing & Mijnhardt, 2015) so as to properly reflect disciplinary, career stage, and country specificities.

My drive to properly reflect disciplinary differences in citation metrics was also the primary reason the software was created, thus constituting the second answer to your question. In 2006 my application for promotion to full professor was rejected, partly because the panel – inaccurately as it turned out later – assessed my citation levels as “modest”. One reason for this modest citation level was that, back in 2006, the Web of Science was still “the only game in town” as a source for citation data. Unfortunately, many International Business journals were not yet included in their database.

That said, my citation levels in Google Scholar – introduced in 2004 – were substantially higher. Google Scholar has a far more inclusive coverage, including not only all academic journals, but also books, book chapters, and other types of academic publications (see e.g. Harzing, 2008, 2013). However, its web interface was mainly designed for keyword searches and didn’t allow users to search for individuals easily, let alone calculate citation metrics for them. So, in 2006 my wonderful husband created this nice little software program for me that drew data from Google Scholar and calculated a few citation metrics, including the then just introduced h-index (see also Harzing, 2007). We decided to call it – very much tongue in cheek – Publish or Perish.

The use of Publish or Perish in promotion applications

Using this software, I was able to demonstrate that, far from being modest, my Google Scholar citation levels were actually substantially higher than those of all but one of the many professors in my department, as well as those of all professors in the International Business field in Australia. Ironically, I discovered that this was true even for my Web of Science citations. Hence, the negative assessment of my citation levels might well have been based primarily on my line manager’s accompanying letter that characterised them as “developing”. So, armed with the Publish or Perish output, my second attempt at promotion included a comparison table with “hard evidence” of my high citation impact (see below). I was promptly promoted to full professor.

Note: citations metrics in this table might appear very low by today's standards. With publications expanding rapidly year on year, citation levels have increased dramatically in the last 20 years. My current h-index is 75 and I have around 1500 new ISI citations per year.

Then I thought: well, if this software program helps me, it might be able to help others too. So, my husband uploaded a free download of the software on my website. Twenty years, eight major versions and hundreds of minor releases later, the software has acquired hundreds of new functions and covers no less than ten data sources: Google Scholar, Google Scholar Profiles, Scopus, Web of Science, CrossRef, PubMed, Open Alex, Semantic Scholar, Lens, and – until Microsoft discontinued it – Microsoft Academic. It has more than two million users and is still free.

[Side note: Earlier in my career, I did something similar with the Journal Quality List. This was a list I created which collated a wide variety of journal rankings to combat the “one list to rule them all” principle. It helped me to demonstrate my academic worth as a junior academic. I maintained this list for over 26 years and 72 updates (see Harzing, 2026d).]

Should we make bibliometrics education compulsory?

Mario Pagliaro: In my experience, most scholars acting as members of selection committees engaged in research evaluation never received education in bibliometrics on how to conduct said evaluation in a competent, informed manner. Would you agree that receiving said education should be necessary?

Indeed, I very much agree that most members of selection, promotion, or evaluation committees do not have the necessary bibliometric knowledge to evaluate other academics based on research metrics. This was illustrated vividly in my own (failed) promotion application that I discussed above. Important decision-makers proclaimed – with an authoritative voice – that my citation record was modest, and everyone simply believed them. The problem is that many senior academics, having grown up in an age in which citations were relatively unimportant, have a very limited knowledge of their own or other academics’ citation records. Moreover, most academics tend to subconsciously overestimate what their own records were when they went up for tenure or promotion. Hence, they are implicitly using an inappropriate reference group.

Disciplinary comparisons are fraught

I have seen this happen again and again in situations where I was a key decision-maker myself and was thus able to correct incorrect assertions. Other academics would proclaim with great certainty that an individual’s – or even a Faculty’s – performance was inadequate, simply because they applied inappropriate disciplinary norms. I vividly remember my Pro-Vice Chancellor research – an academic working in a branch of Medicine – brandishing the Faculty where I was Associated Dean Research as “underperforming”.

It was true that, on average, our publications levels were less than a third of those of some of the (Life) Sciences Faculties. But I had to diplomatically explain to him that my Faculty was already ranked in the in the top-20 worldwide in the past 5 years in terms of publications in ISI listed journals. The image below shows how rapidly the University of Melbourne had improved in a decade. Tripling our output would rank us at #1 worldwide and would leave Harvard street lengths behind us.

Training (voluntary or compulsory) or bibliometric experts?

So yes, there is plenty of scope for improvement in terms of bibliometrically well-informed decision-making. But I’m not sure what the best way is to achieve this. The problem isn’t so much that evaluators don’t know, the problem is that they think they know. You need to have the meta-level reflective skills to understand that your own knowledge is limited. We could offer bibliometrics training in universities; quite a few librarians have already designed very accessible training courses. Many of these even include guidance on how to use the Publish or Perish software.

But in my experience, these training sessions are often attended largely by those who already have a good knowledge of research metrics. This is general pattern well-known by trainers; those who attend voluntary training are often the ones who need it least. So, in order for this to really address bibliometric ignorance, the training would need to be compulsory. Unfortunately, compulsory training hardly ever works either; academics hate being forced to take training courses. They will do as little as possible to pass and then forget all about it.

What I think might work is having a dedicated bibliometrics expert on every evaluation committee. This could be a librarian, a member of the professional research support team, or even an academic who has educated themselves. Obviously, the chair of the committee would need to ensure that these bibliometric experts are taken seriously, especially if they are positioned lower down in the academic hierarchy.

That said, I am quite sceptical about the likelihood of this being implemented systematically. I would love to be proved wrong in this. But just to be on the safe side I would always encourage individual academics to “educate” their evaluation committee about disciplinary norms, as well as typical citation levels for the academic level in question. In my many blogposts and books, I have provided detailed guidance on how to do this (see in particular Harzing, 2022c).

Did the type of PoP use align with your expectations?

Mario Pagliaro: For scientists in the natural sciences, it is often noticed that what happens to one’s discovery is different from the inventor’s expectation when society starts to use the invention. In this respect, did the use of PoP from users worldwide align with your expectations?

That’s a very perceptive question, and yes this absolutely happened to Publish or Perish too. But it happened quite gradually. The initial use of the software – individual scholars using it to make their case for impact in an evaluation context – was very much the reason why my husband created it for me. Many users even saw its rationale more narrowly within this same evaluative context: a simple h-index calculator for Google Scholar. But its use cases increased considerably over the years, facilitated by the launch of major new versions – we are currently at version 8 – and hundreds of minor updates.

I have been running a user survey for the Publish or Perish software since 2015, which gives me a good insight into why and how people use the software (for more detail, see also Harzing, 2026a). In the first year I ran the survey, 90% of the survey respondents – who had often been using the software for more than 5 years – were using it to check their own h-index or citations (see red bar in the image below).

* red = 2015, green = 2020, purple = 2025

Respondents were able to tick more than one predefined answer, so I learned the software was also used to look up other academics, either out of curiosity (by nearly 2/3 of the PoP users), or to formally evaluate them for promotion, tenure, job or funding applications (by more than half of the PoP users). The other use cases that I had identified – literature reviews, finding the most cited papers on a topic, bibliometric research, and deciding where to submit your papers – were all mentioned by some of the survey respondents, but they were not yet very common.

This distribution of use cases matched my initial expectations and was also reflected in the academic position of respondents. More than a third of the respondents in 2015 were full professors, with another third either Associate or Assistant Professor. Moreover, the software’s usage was heavily concentrated in Anglophone countries. The USA, Australia and the UK made up the top-3, and nearly a third of all respondents came from these countries. In addition to heavy usage by academics, however, the software was also used regularly in commercial research laboratories in companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Google, as well as in government departments such as the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Agency for International Development.

PoP usage for government-led research evaluations

Moreover, in its first decade, the PoP software also played a major role in government-led research evaluations in Poland, Italy, France, and Greece, and as  such these countries made it to the top-10 users in 2015 too. Through popular press coverage and user feedback I learned that it was even used by individual academics in these (and other) countries to expose nepotism in academic appointments, or simply to identify what one female user called “academic buffoons”, academics whose posturing exceeds their performance. The software’s most intriguing use case occurred in Italy, where the Italian newspaper Linkiesta used Publish or Perish to compare the academic credentials of ministers in the new Monti government with those in the old Berlusconi government (Harzing, 2012).

In France, CNRS (Conseil National de Recherche Social) ordered academics in the Social Sciences to use the Publish or Perish software when submitting their publication and citation record in their national research evaluation. This not only led to a surge of technical support requests from France – CNRS hadn’t asked for our permission or even informed us – but also to angry emails from French academics who told me they were going on strike because of the “Harzing index”. They probably thought that the h in h-index referred to Harzing and that I had invented the h-index rather than Jorge Hirsch.

How did PoP develop in the 2020s and beyond?

Mario Pagliaro: So how do you see PoP usage developing in the 2020s and beyond?

In 2020, Publish or Perish had been on the scene for nearly 15 years and had acquired several new “generations” of users, many of whom were students. This meant that in relative – though not necessarily absolute – terms its usage for evaluation purposes was declining and its usage for literature reviews and bibliometric research was increasing. Judging from the most recent usage data in 2025, we can see a further intensification of these trends. For the new users – those using the software for less than 3 months – that dominated my survey respondents in 2025, PoP usage has clearly shifted away from evaluating academics to evaluating papers. As can be seen in the image above, less than a quarter of the survey respondents is now using the software to check their h-index.

This new type of usage – evaluating papers rather than academics – finds its most notable expression in using the software for literature reviews. Two thirds of new users are using PoP for this particular purpose, and it is now by far the most common use case for the software. With desk-research and systematic literature reviews increasingly popular since the Covid-19 pandemic made primary research more difficult, this is also likely to remain PoP’s dominant use case in the future.

That said, about a third of our new PoP users also use the software for bibliometric research, to evaluate journals, or to find the most cited papers in a field. As a result, references to the Publish or Perish software have also increased significantly over the years. The graph below shows the development over the years. Ironically, Publish or Perish has now become my second 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.

This changing type of usage was also accompanied by a notable change in the demographic profile of new users. Student use is now far more common than it was in 2015 when students made up only 5% of the users, in 2025 the software had even made it to high-schools. This also meant that six out of the top-10 countries with the largest number of PoP users are now non-Western: Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Brazil, Malaysia, and Colombia, with Ghana at number 11. In these countries, students (and even academics) often do not have access to commercial bibliographic databases and thus PoP offers them a lifeline for their coursework assignments or Research Masters/PhD research.

PoP usage in literature reviews and bibliometric research

In the past 5-10 years, we have also further facilitated this type of usage – literature reviews and bibliometric research – by introducing nine new data sources, adding the option to export full abstracts, creating a more flexible keyword search, and making it easier to replicate searches across data sources by pre-filling the query form with identical search terms. I can't think of a better way to summarise the advantages of using PoP than these two user survey responses.

Searching for publications through internet portals is a pain as they are typically quite slow, all have different interfaces that aren't particularly intuitive and don't help at all to keep track of the searches you have already done. PoP solves all the issues above; it is both easier and faster to use than web portal alternatives. With PoP I feel much more confident that I can perform a systematic review of available literature on a topic. I also really like how the results from a search are displayed; it is easy to rank them and/or filter them by a wide variety of criteria, and this is really helpful.

My current research project included 44 unique keyword & author searches with 14 citing work retrievals. I did a similar project last year using only Google Scholar and an EBSCO search interface; it took me several weeks to get to the same point. Using PoP cut the time by 60-80% and I have the search results stored - I can look back over the results history. PoP is extremely powerful for this kind of research project.

I would argue that with the increasing dominance of GenAI in academic research in general, and literature reviews in particular, this particular function of Publish or Perish may become even more important in the future. Unfortunately, many PhD students now appear to be outsourcing one of the key stages of the research process – immersing yourself in the literature (see also Harzing, 2024a) – to GenAI, seeing a literature review as a “chore” to get through before doing the “real work”.

This often leads to hallucinated references and/or citations to a limited set of dominant voices (see also Harzing, 2002). In contrast, careful key words searches in Publish or Perish can provide you with a systematic, comprehensive, and accurate overview of the current conversations in your field. As a researcher, you cannot expect to contribute to a field’s conversation if you haven’t first immersed yourself in it (see also Chapter 5 of my book “Publishing in Academic Journals” (Harzing, 2022a).

However, it is important to realise that – even more so than in 2020 – survey respondents in 2025 were largely new users and were largely students. Hence, in addition to the increasing use of PoP to evaluate papers, there is likely to be considerable “heritage” use for any of the PoP functions to evaluate academics. I have written up all these use cases in great detail in the various guides I have written for Publish or Perish over the years, with the most recent guide (Harzing, 2023b) running to 375 pages (see Using the Publish or Perish software).

Whether you are using PoP to decide which journals to submit your papers to, to prepare for a job interview or promotion application, to do a literature review, to do bibliometric research, to write laudations or obituaries, to find reviewers, examiners, referees, or keynote speakers, to do some homework before meeting your academic hero, or even to study the historical development of a discipline, you can find detailed guidance there. If you like your readings short and sweet, my recent series of 22 little-known use cases of the Publish or Perish software (Harzing, 2026c, linking all 21 other use cases) might also be of interest.

What can you do to improve your citation impact?

Mario Pagliaro: In Chapter Six of your 2023 book Measuring and improving research impact, you outline a step-by-step process to improve citation impact. What are these steps, and how did you identify them?

Yes indeed, I did outline a 7-step process to improve the citation impact of your papers in this chapter, although many of these steps can also help to improve wider societal impact. However, it is important to note that these seven steps relate to just one of the four C’s of citation impact: communication. I see communication as the most fundamental step in improving citation impact, academics cannot read and cite your paper if they don’t know about it. That said, the three other C’s are important too: competence, collaboration and care (see Harzing, 2017).

Competence, collaboration, and care

First, competence: your work won’t normally be cited if it isn’t any good. If you publish low-quality work, then normally you will not be cited very much. That is not always true, we can all think of counter examples; some very bad work does get cited and some very good work doesn’t. However, on average, the better your work is, the more likely it will be cited.

Second, collaboration with other academics typically leads to higher citation levels, both indirectly and directly. Indirectly, because it often leads to higher quality research, especially if you collaborate with academics who have a complementary skill set. However, there is a direct effect too: co-authored papers tend to be cited much more than single authored papers. This is because each of the authors has their own social network, and thus your paper’s diffusion is multiplied. Moreover, your co-authors will often cite your other work in their other projects as well, simply because they know and trust you.

Thirdly, care. This means caring about your own reputation. Your reputation is your most valuable asset as an academic. Academia is a small world, most of us have a very good idea of who is behaving unethically. Nobody is keen to use or cite the work of an academic they don’t respect. But this also means caring for other academics and helping them whenever you can. Interpersonal care builds relationships that are intrinsically meaningful, but it also facilitates the diffusion of your work.

7 steps to improve your reputation and impact

Getting back to this 7-step process you asked about, there is no rocket science behind it. These seven simple steps derived purely from my own experience of what worked and what didn’t. The first four steps in the process are all about making your paper available online to ensure it can be found by people who want to find it. The next three steps of the process involve communicating about your paper to increase the likelihood that people will find it. Below I have summarized these steps very briefly. For the full description of how to do this, including many practical examples, see Harzing (2023a).

• Step 1: Create a pre-publication version: As soon as your paper is accepted for a journal, create a pre-publication version. This is the paper that was accepted for the journal, but without the journal formatting.
• Step 2: Add your paper to your university repository: This is not only compulsory in many countries/universities, but also a crucial means to diffuse your research. Google Scholar parses university repositories; it normally picks up your paper within a few days.
• Step 3: Update your researcher profiles: This is where other academics look for your most recent publications. At the very least, keep your university’s staff profile, your Google Scholar profile, and your ORCID profile up to date.
• Step 4: Add your paper to online research repositories: Depending on your own preferences and disciplinary traditions, this could be traditional repositories such as SSRN and ArXiv, or the more recently launched ResearchGate or Academia.edu, which combine their repository function with (limited) interactive functions, nudging them closer to forming a social media platforms for academics.

With your paper available on all the relevant platforms, the next phase is to start communicating about it.

• Step 5: Share news through social media: After the demise of Twitter, I mainly use LinkedIn for this, but you can use any social media platform. Just write a few lines to introduce the paper, include the full paper reference and the abstract, link to the full-text version and that’s it. Or create an interesting visual and share that.
• Step 6: Sending a personal email: In the age or social media, email might seem a bit “old-fashioned”, but it is still a very important means of communication for academics in my generation. Many academics in this age group are not heavy social media users. However, they might well be an important audience for your paper, as they typically hold positions of influence.
• Step 7: Write up a full blogpost on your paper in an accessible language: You can write up a blogpost about an individual article, especially if its findings are topical. But as academics we generally do not create research impact by publishing one article on a particular topic; we create research impact by having a research stream on a particular topic. Thus, it could also make sense to collate your articles on a similar theme in one substantive blogpost. In fact, this can be an excellent way to “revitalise” interest in your older publications as you can show how they “build up” to your more recent work.

But the main shift in mindset we need is moving from publication as the end of our scholarship journey to impact as its final destination. And this is what your next question alludes to.

Should we refocus on impact over output?

Mario Pagliaro: In several of your publications you have suggested that rather than seeing journal articles as the final destination of our scholarship journey, academics would better reframe research outcomes as the positive impact that their research has on others through the good it does on other scholars, for students, society, and the community. Can you further  elaborate on this important suggestion?

Yes, very happy to elaborate on this as I do feel strongly about this. I have written about this regularly, but most extensively in my “Impact 101” white paper (Harzing, 2022b) and my book “Measuring and Improving Research Impact” (Harzing, 2023a). In these publications I outlined how we can realise research impact in three key academic roles: research, teaching, and external engagement (see table below).

Before I dive deeper into each of these roles, it is important to realise that impact for different audiences might well require different types of publications: books and academic journal articles for our research role, textbooks for our teaching role, and practitioner journals, magazines, or policy reports for our engagement role. The good thing about Google Scholar – the most frequently used of the nine data sources that Publish or Perish currently interfaces with – is that it covers all these outlets.

Research role

In the research role of our academic jobs, our target audience is other academics, and our ultimate goal is to progress our collective scientific knowledge through the incorporation of our research. Whether or not we have influenced other academics is typically measured by citations in academic journals, books, and conference papers. We have discussed this above in our discussion of the Publish or Perish software. But even though citation impact is well-established, there are still many academics whose horizon stops at the point of publication.

As I asked in my four C’s of citation impact (Harzing, 2017, see also the previous section) “why would you publish if nobody cites your work”? To me not publishing is a bit like being mute, but not being cited is a lot like talking without anybody actually listening. In my view, academic research should always aim to contribute to academic discourse. Even so, there are two other ways in which our research might create an impact.

Teaching role

As academics, we all have a tremendous impact on our students. Obviously, some of this impact will be completely unrelated to the research we do. However, in any good university, research feeds into the classroom and students benefit from research-informed teaching. As academics, we facilitate this through prescribing our own and other academics’ research as course readings.

So, how do you know whether your research is used beyond your own classroom? First, Google Books is a good way to figure out whether your research is cited in textbooks. However, to discover whether your publications (academic articles, textbooks or practitioner articles) are used in teaching syllabi, I would suggest using Open Syllabus Explorer, an incredibly useful and versatile free tool (for a review, see Harzing, 2024b).

Engagement role

External engagement captures the impact of our research on industry, government, and the public/society at large, with as its ultimate goal addressing key societal problems. Measuring this type of impact is challenging. Recent efforts such as Overton – a database that captures policy impact by tracking citations in policy documents – might help. A simplified version of this database is offered through the free SAGEPolicyProfiles (for a review, see Harzing, 2024c) that is targeted at individual researchers wanting to showcase their policy impact in promotion, tenure, or funding applications.

Are universities changing performance expectations?

Mario Pagliaro: In your academic experience involving collaborations and direct knowledge of many universities worldwide, do you see that this change – focusing on impact rather than output – is taking place?

There are certainly little sparks of progress in this area. There are now more universities that are recognising the importance of impact. In countries such as the United Kingdom, this is influenced by the inclusion of impact case studies and research culture in the national research evaluation. However, many universities are still treating funding (input) and publications (throughput) as the “end product” of research. So, in order to make real progress in this field, I argue that we need to dramatically reduce performance expectations for funding and publications. This will allow academics to create real impact with their work. More generally, we need to ensure that research impact is not seen as “yet another tick-box” on a long and constantly growing list of academic performance indicators.

In today’s academic world, it seems we need to be ground-breaking researchers, publishing constantly in the top journals and bringing in bucket loads of research funding, inspiring teachers who are not only entertaining and enlightening their students, but who are also scrupulously fair whilst caring for their students’ individual differences and providing pastoral care. And on top of that many of us need to be effective, efficient, politically astute, and inclusive academic administrators or managers.

Whilst I fully agree that all these activities are important in academia, we cannot expect every academic to do all of these things equally well. Universities need to collectively fulfil all of these functions, but that doesn’t mean that every single academic needs to do all of these, certainly not at every single stage of their career. So, with the increasing importance of impact should also come an openness to a larger variety of academic career paths, allowing academics to focus on their strengths, instead of trying – and usually failing – to do everything.

Going back to 2006 and the starting point of this interview, I have been very fortunate that – since becoming full professor – I have been able to craft two distinct, consecutive, career profiles (see also Harzing, 2025). Both drew on my strengths, but they had very different emphases. The first included nearly a decade of formal research (higher degrees) leadership at a research-intensive university in Australia. This drew on my strengths in research administration, research evaluation, and research metrics (see image above), and coincided with a new research program on bibliometrics and research evaluation.

This was followed by a move to a post-92 university in the UK for the next decade, where I job-crafted an informal leadership position in research mentorship and staff development (see video below). I combined this with knowledge transfer to the wider academic community through online resources. Then, in 2024, I took early retirement, enabling me to not only devote more time to blogging, creating videos, and writing provocative white papers about academia, but also to engage in a range of academic volunteering activities that support the next generation of academics in their own efforts to transform academia.

So, if I could end this article with my wish for the future, I would very much like someone who reads this piece in ten years’ time to see it as a relic of a bygone era, an era in which a broader conception of impact and academic careers was still seen as a novelty, just like citation impact was a novelty to many academics 20 years ago. The practice of research has changed tremendously since I did my PhD in the mid 1990s (see Harzing, 2026b), but I would argue that both our research practices and our academic career profiles need to change a whole lot more to be fit for today’s world.

References

Harzing, A.W. (2002) Are our referencing errors undermining our scholarship and credibility? The case of expatriate failure rates, Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 127-148.

Harzing, A.W. (2007) Reflections on the h-index, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/reflections-on-the-h-index

Harzing, A.W.; Wal, R. van der (2008) Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis?, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 61-73.

Harzing, A.W. (2010) The Publish or Perish Book: Your guide to effective and responsible citation analysis, Melbourne: Tarma Software Research.

Harzing, A.W.K. (2012) Five minutes with Anne-Wil Harzing: “An Italian newspaper used Publish or Perish to compare the academic credentials of ministers in the new Monti government with those in the old Berlusconi government”, LSE Impact Blog, 3 February 2012.

Harzing, A.W. (2013) A preliminary test of Google Scholar as a source for citation data: A longitudinal study of Nobel Prize winners, Scientometrics, vol. 93, no. 3, pp. 1057-1075.

Harzing, A.W.; Alakangas, S.; Adams, D. (2014) hIa: An individual annual h-index to accommodate disciplinary and career length differences, Scientometrics, vol. 99, no. 3, pp. 811-821. 

Harzing, A.W.; Mijnhardt, W. (2015) Proof over promise: Towards a more inclusive ranking of Dutch academics in Economics & Business, Scientometrics, vol. 102, no. 1, pp. 727-749. 

Harzing, A.W. (2016) The Publish or Perish tutorial: 80 easy tips to get the best out of the Publish or Perish software, London: Tarma Software Research.

Harzing, A.W. (2017) The four C's of getting cited, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/the-four-cs-of-getting-cited

Harzing, A.W. (2022a) Publishing in academic journals: Crafting your career in academia, Published by Tarma Software Research Ltd, London, United Kingdom. 

Harzing, A.W. (2022b) Research Impact 101, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/research-impact-101

Harzing, A.W. (2022c) Writing effective promotion applications: Crafting your career in academia, Published by Tarma Software Research Ltd, London, United Kingdom.

Harzing, A.W. (2023a) Measuring and improving research impact: Crafting your career in academia, Published by Tarma Software Research Ltd, London, United Kingdom. 

Harzing, A.W. (2023b) Using the Publish or Perish software: Crafting your career in academia, Published by Tarma Software Research Ltd, London, United Kingdom.

Harzing, A.W. (2024a) Doing a literature review: an 8-step process, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/doing-a-literature-review

Harzing, A.W. (2024b) Open Syllabus: a treasure-trove for research and teaching, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/open-syllabus

Harzing, A.W. (2024c) SAGEPolicyProfiles: a treasure-trove for discovering policy impact, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/sagepolicyprofiles

Harzing, A.W. (2025) You finally made it to full professor, now what? Crafting your academic identity and sustaining it in retirement, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/you-finally-made-it-to-full-professor-now-what

Harzing, A.W. (2026a) 2006-2026 - The changing usage of Publish or Perish over the years: where, why, when, what, who and how?, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/the-changing-usage-of-publish-or-perish-over-the-years

Harzing, A.W. (2026b) Doing research in an analog time, www.harzing.com white paper, available here: https://harzing.com/publications/white-papers/doing-research-in-an-analog-time

Harzing, A.W. (2026c) Finding the pearls in your citation record, www.harzing.com blogpost, available here: https://harzing.com/blog/2026/06/finding-the-pearls-in-your-citation-record

Harzing, A.W. (2026d) The end of an era: farewell to the Journal Quality list, www.harzing.com blogpost, available here: https://harzing.com/blog/2026/05/the-end-of-an-era-farewell-to-the-journal-quality-list