Reckoning with my ‘ghost years’: why a high publication rate doesn’t always reflect success

Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Israel Sebastian / Getty ‘Publish or perish’ is a common mantra in academia. By that metric, I definitely did not perish in 2025. Last year, I published seven scholarly articles as either the first or corresponding author. As an ex-postdoc who became a research scientist studying astrobiology at Carnegie Science in Washington DC towards the end of last year, I’ve been writing academic articles for more than a decade. I have never before experienced such a bounty of publications. Last year’s publications represent more than 40% of my first- and corresponding-author papers. By almost any measure, it was a wildly successful year. But I’m not here to brag. Rather, I want to point out that just because last year was prolific, it does not mean that the preceding years in which my research output was lower were not also successful. Invisible progress I did not produce a single lead-author paper between my final publication as a graduate student in 2017 and the first paper I published as a postdoc in 2022. Having such a huge gap in your publication record usually spells disaster for an early-career researcher. We are judged mainly on our output of scientific publications. The larger the volume of papers and the higher their impact, the better. But any peer-reviewed product is infinitely better than nothing, especially when your career is young and your CV is short. Going several years without a first-author paper is seen as a red flag in the academic job market. Gender gap in research publishing is improving — slowly