Comparing the situations of anthropologists around the world as to publication and evaluation criteria

In January 2022, the World Council of Anthropological Associations Task Force "Making Anthropology Global" was formed, consisting of Gonzalo Díaz Crovetto, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, P.-j. Ezeh, Shannon Morreira, Yasmeen Arif, Chen Gang, Gordon Mathews (chairperson), and Takami Kuwayama, reporting on Chile, Norway, Nigeria, South Africa. India, China, Hong Kong, and Japan. The task force met via Zoom once a month during 2022 and early 2023, with assignments after each meeting, whereby members wrote about the situation of anthropologists in their own societies. Initially, the task force focused on the impact of citation indexes such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) on promotion practices for anthropologists in our different societies. As Kuwayama (2017, 162−63) writes, "as of April 2017, a total of 82 journals are listed in SSCI under the category of anthropology. . . . Of these, the US accounts for 38, the UK 21, Germany 6, Australia 3, the Netherlands, 3, Chile, 2, France 2, Spain 2, Argentina 1, Italy 1, New Zealand 1, Slovenia 1, and Switzerland 1." This situation is essentially unchanged in the years since, with Anglo-American hegemony an indisputable fact in anthropological journal publishing. However, as we proceeded in our work, we soon realized that SSCI was only one factor in how anthropologists were being evaluated, and so we began to examine the more general situations of anthropologists in our different societies. This brief report summarizes our findings in terms of publication expectations, citation indexes, language usage, and promotional criteria among anthropologists in the eight different societies we represent and also offers our recommendations. A significant limitation of this report is that it covers a small range of societies, albeit from a wide geographic range around the world, and we hope in the future to expand these to cover all the world, but we do sense that the diversity of the societies we represent offers at least the start of a global profile. We begin by providing a country-by-country report. We then provide a comparison of the different issues raised in these reports. Finally, we arrive at a few suggestions for how global problems in publication, language, promotion, and other issues might be alleviated. Chilean anthropologists in universities are expected to publish articles, books, or book chapters, with the SSCI used to rate publications. ERIH PLUS (a humanities and social sciences index) has recently been incorporated as an equivalent of SSCI. In Chile, there is no centralized scientific committee or council that determines the value of journals on some kind of scale or score assigned by peers. Instead, these rankings are based entirely on the world academic system, as embodied in SSCI and ERIH PLUS. Smaller universities may financially encourage publishing in journals or book chapters that appear in SSCI, Scopus, and SciELO indexes through amounts ranging from US $400 to US $2500 for each publication. Having permanent employment as a professor comes after one or 2 years of "performance agreement." Employment in universities has become more difficult lately and is focused, above all, on research capacity, especially with regard to the possibility of publishing in high-impact journals and applying for public research funds. There is greater emphasis on individual careers than on collective projects. The reliance on citation indexes takes place in terms of research grants and also in acquiring an academic position and advancement in Chile. Formal entry as a university professor and not as an adjunct professor in the university—of which there are many, working under precarious and low-paid conditions—typically requires prior publication in SSCI-listed journals and in some cases a prior award of a national research grant. The SSCI index is the highest reference value. As an associate professor at my university, I have to publish at least one article in an SSCI-indexed journal and another in a SciELO-indexed journal per year. This requirement varies from university to university in Chile, but almost all anthropologists in Chile are influenced in their career progression by how much they have published within journals listed in SSCI and other citation indexes. While there are a significant number of anthropological journals in SSCI that are Spanish-language, and two from Chile itself, this nonetheless entails significant pressure to publish in English, since most SSCI journals are in English. Value being given only to indexed publications, especially those indexed by the SSCI, has led to the fetishization of paper production in Chile. What is the problem with this? (1) The time that academics can dedicate to other practices of anthropological value outside of publication becomes increasingly scarce; concretely, this means less time for extra-university anthropological projects, for the development and promotion of academic and teaching activities, for internal commitments, and for student care. (2) There is a devaluation of nonindexed publications, such as texts aimed at a broader public. And (3) there is a greater emphasis on metrics in the production of differences between universities, rather than on academic work in and of itself. We cannot validly assume that a text published in a certain journal or appearing in a certain index is necessarily worth more than other textual productions or anthropological works that do not appear in indexes. There are three main factors that distinguish Norwegian publication issues. First, SSCI is rarely used systematically in anthropology, although both SSCI and Google Scholar are often invoked. Second, the issue of language is fraught and controversial. Norwegian national identity rests to a great extent on a complex linguistic basis, and the unions, interest groups, and politicians involved in scientific matters regularly voice concern about the declining proportion of Norwegian-language publishing. On the other hand, if scholars want to be read beyond Norway, they must write in English, which is feasible for most Norwegian academics. If their English is poor, they can apply for funding for language editing. However, the strong linguistic nationalism permeating national discourse directly contradicts the equally strong incentives to "publish internationally," producing a complicated double-bind. The political debate about language is currently intensified owing to an increasing predominance of the English language. Third, journals are ranked according to a national set of criteria decided largely by the disciplines themselves. These differences make a difference when people apply for jobs. Publishing "internationally" is not enough. An article in the JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) obviously counts more than one in the Journal of Mauritian Studies. There are three categories: levels 2, 1, and 0, with level 2 as highest. In anthropology, just 14 journals have the rank of 2, while more than a hundred are classified as belonging to level 1. Level 0 consists of journals that may be considered for promotion, and some of them are good, decent journals. A similar ranking system applies to publishers. Both quantity and quality count in career-building, and journal articles now confer more credit points and prestige than monographs. In Norway, as in other societies, the natural sciences tend to dictate criteria for quality and evaluation. For example, in the national database of registration for scientific publications in Norway called Cristin,1 categories of publications have coauthored journal articles as a default value, whereas book chapters are classified breezily as "part of book." PhD students are now advised to write article-based dissertations with a view to develop their academic careers in a satisfactory way, although social anthropologists still tend to consider the monograph the highest literary form of the subject. Writing monographs no longer pays off in the academic reward system; two or three journal articles have the same value as a monograph. Younger scholars are aware that they need to publish in English, in reputable journals, and that they ought to have published a monograph with a good publisher to get a tenured job. A broader question for Norway and beyond concerns criteria for qualifying other than purely academic publishing: Can a scholar who has prolifically produced reports for the public sector, has served on many committees giving policy advice on anything from waste management to minority policies, and wishes to return to academia be evaluated along alternative criteria? Could 10 reports on applied issues, or five popular books on anthropological topics, qualify an applicant for a full professorship, or does academia remain secluded, conservative, and enclosed? This debate is very topical at the moment, as several former polytechnics try to become universities. To be promoted to the three highest ranks in academia—senior lecturer, reader, and professor—in most Nigerian universities, the applicant must have published in journals that have journal-metric ranking of foreign provenance, as listed in Thomson Reuters, Scimago, and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) citation indexes. Candidates for these ranks must have two, five, and eight of their journal articles, respectively, in such journals. For books, too, publication in publishing houses that are well known internationally and are of foreign ownership is encouraged. A rulebook in one Nigerian university gives as examples of such publishers: "an academic press, Elsevier, Longman, Macmillan . . . and Saunders." The language of publication is not an issue in Nigeria, since academic writing, like academic instruction, is typically in English. The issue instead is that of foreign versus African publication. There are two basic views: one that favors this exocentric position that is conflated with higher quality, and the other that favors what might be called an Afrocentric position. Each of the views might be found along individual and institutional lines. Some universities, such as the University of Benin in Nigeria, actually encourage local articles while not rejecting the need to publish in foreign journals. The University of Nigeria, founded in the year of Nigeria's independence from Great Britain to seek knowledge that would promote scholarship from an African standpoint, ironically seems now to be at the forefront of the exogenous stance, seeking foreign publication. The turnabout is ironic because some journals founded in the early days of the university attained international renown, such as Ikenga for anthropology,2 based at the University of Nigeria, and the West African Journal of Archaeology, based at the University of Ibadan. The competition with better-funded foreign rivals meant that many of these journals could not survive, and those still extant are struggling. Less-determined scholars, the majority, were panicked into writing to suit this academic fashion and not carry out truly original research they would have preferred to pursue. At a conference in Tanzania in 2016, Dr. Ebrima Sall, the former executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, or CODESRIA, based in Dakar, Senegal, spoke of a plan to develop a journal metric that would address African needs. He did not seem to have gone far with that before his tenure ended, and his successor does not seem to have made the project a priority. Sadly, African Anthropologist,3 a journal that used to be published by CODESRIA, has apparently become moribund—another victim of the unfair competition.4 Younger anthropologists in Nigeria may lament this situation. As one junior anthropologist told me in an interview, "I have always wondered why publication in foreign impact-factor-rated journals has to be a benchmark for promotion. This does not take into cognizance the . . . worth of individual articles. In my university, publication in impact-factor-rated journals determines how and when academics climb the ladder of promotion, especially from senior lecturer position upwards. This may actually be counterproductive, in that encouraging quantification can lower the standard of academic research." South African history and its impact on structural and power relations in the present means that universities can be broken down into various categories. "Historically white universities" (HWUs) were reserved for white students and staff under apartheid and were well funded (Badat, 2009). These are still research-intensive universities that are more highly ranked within global university ranking systems. "Historically black universities" (HBUs) were reserved for black students and staff under apartheid and were underresourced. At present, they are greatly strengthened but are still not as resource-rich as the historically white universities. A third category is that of "merged universities," which resulted from a postapartheid attempt to unify the differentially resourced higher education sector. Publishing expectations for anthropologists are different in different categories of university. Although universities vary in their publishing expectations, most expect a minimum of one article per year (often broadly measured over a 3-year cycle due to the slowness of academic publishing). Many academics will publish more than this, particularly near the beginning of their careers. Across all universities, regardless of expectations of how many articles will be published per year, the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) subsidy policy has an impact on where anthropologists publish. DHET provides universities with a government subsidy for each publication, as long as the publications are on the DHET-approved journal list, indicating peer review and good publication praxis within the journal, or, in the case of books, if the book is peer reviewed and a letter of proof of peer review is submitted. The list of DHET-approved journals includes both local South African journals and international journals; subsidy for journal articles is the same whether published in a local or international journal, as long as it is DHET-approved. This means that local South African journals are a regular space of publication for South African anthropologists, including the Anthropology Southern Africa Association (ASNA) journal, Anthropology Southern Africa.5 The DHET list is linked to the SSCI, in that if a publication is listed in the SSCI, it will be DHET-approved. Nonetheless. South African academics are more likely to be familiar with the DHET list than with the SSCI. In terms of status, however, international journals are often perceived as more prestigious than local ones. As long as a publication is on the DHET list, it counts for subsidy, regardless of its ranking within international categories. As in other parts of the world, this has led to an emphasis on quantity over quality. Promotion and hiring practices tend to differentiate publications in terms of quality, as determined by international reputation and impact factor of journals. Most universities in South Africa have permanent academic posts, which means that being hired into a lecturer-level post can be a job for the rest of one's working career, within which the academic will then be able to progress from lecturer to senior lecturer to associate professor and then to professor. There are also many anthropologists in more precarious positions, in contract roles within departments, within which most performance will be judged in terms of teaching but who also must be publishing if they hope to secure a more permanent academic role. It is usually sufficient for early-career academics to have only published in local South African DHET-listed journals; by the stage of senior lecturer, however, there is an expectation across universities, whether research-intensive or not, that anthropologists will begin publishing in international journals. Books and monographs are also highly rated across universities, as they earn a large subsidy. Applications for promotion also generally expect academics to submit bibliometric citation profiles, showing that their work has been cited locally and internationally. In sum, the structures within South African academia tend to support peer-reviewed local journals, of which there are many strong ones, but also to direct more prestige toward publication in high-impact-factor international journals. In India, the historical divide in terms of quality and reputation has been between central-government-funded public universities in metropolitan cities and other university models around the country, with the central universities ranking higher. Currently, an increasing trend is toward private universities established by entrepreneur philanthropists. All formally recognized universities follow a countrywide body, the University Grants Commission, which mandates the appraisal criteria that must be applied to publications. The higher priority has been on hard science journals, and the typical divide between the hard and social sciences is prevalent. While SSCI has not fully served as a benchmark, a current trend has been to use the SCOPUS index system, which currently also has a broader reach in the hard sciences. There's also the UGC CARE index, a listing found within the University Grants Commission, which carries a list of acceptable journals.6 The quality of these inclusions is a matter of some contention. Some well-known international journals may not be present. However, an important motivation to create this list was the proliferation of predatory journals of dubious origin that published overnight on payment. With these journals, peer review or other academic publishing standards were quite out of the question. These journals found easy prey among young scholars, who were expected to have journal publications as part of doctoral thesis requirements. Overall, very few locally published journals exist in English in anthropology/sociology, although the medium of instruction largely is English as are syllabi. The Indian Anthropologist is associated with the Indian Anthropological Association,7 while Contributions to Indian Sociology is a long-standing journal of repute for publishing social anthropological work on India and located in an Indian institution.8 Since the 2010s, a few more journals that publish work by anthropologists and sociologists in English have come into circulation, like Society and Culture in South Asia.9 There are a number of vernacular-language journals on sociological and anthropological themes; given the vast variety of languages in the nation, their circulation and citation remain limited to the language community. Overall, international publications of good standing carry more circulating valence and are considered more desirable in quality and standards than most local publications. English is the preferred language of publication in most academic circles. The issue of global competitiveness is a matter of concern in the wide range of publications that are authored by local scholars, an issue that is further marred by the usual hegemonies and exclusionary practices of mainstream international journals. Competitive publication counts are needed when hiring is involved or when promotion is under consideration. For example, movement from assistant to associate professor generally requires at least five peer-reviewed journal publications. The UGC CARE list becomes crucial in these calculations, although discretion may be used by local committees in their decisions. At the same time, sabbaticals and research time in fields like anthropology, where fieldwork is a method of choice, are not guaranteed and often rare. Inevitably, this leads to fewer publications. Massive universities like the University of Delhi had not been hiring for many years while I was there, which kept many sanctioned positions empty. The teaching load was taken care of partially by temporary hires, who had abysmal conditions of work and no job security, leading to younger scholars with precarious publication profiles. Books are a high priority, and academic publishing houses are preferred along with international university presses. A disturbing trend currently is the closure of reputed international academic publishers' branch offices in India. Book publication is also moving toward overt market demand rather than quality of scholarship. Publications are considered very competitive and important in the ranking system of universities, impacting private universities more than public ones. Research grants also carry much weight; however, local grant availability is much higher in the hard sciences. International or local grants are rare in social anthropology and are often about collaborative efforts, which involve leading investigators from the Global North. Some private universities are now beginning to offer competitive research grants, hopefully leading to publications. A growing number of new private universities also hold the hope for job openings in social anthropology, as a tenured position does affect the potential to publish. All in all, in a context like that of India, no single survey will be enough to capture the geography and history of even one cluster like that of social anthropology. In China, there is great pressure for professors in all disciplines to publish. It is a common practice in all universities in China that at the end of a year, one needs to submit their annual work report, and then the work will be ranked "excellent," "pass," or "fail." Scores in teaching and research are most important. For individual professors, which of these two is more important depends on whether they work at teaching departments or research institutes. Research rankings include both the grants one receives and one's publications: books and articles. Each university has its own way to rank publishers both in China and in foreign countries. For articles, each university usually has two lists of journals, which put academic journals in different ranks. One list is for journals published in China, and the other is for journals published in foreign countries. For Chinese anthropology journals, the CSSCI, the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, developed in 1997 and now managed by Nanjing University, is most important.10 For foreign journals, SSCI and SCI are the most important indexes. Major universities usually put SSCI papers above CSSCI papers. In many top universities in China, if one wants to get promoted to a professor position, one needs to publish papers in SSCI journals. This not only affects one's promotions but also one's income. Many universities give bonuses to incentivize professors' publication. In some universities, if one publishes a paper in the journal Social Sciences in China11 or Nature or Science, you will receive a 200,000 yuan (roughly US$25,000) reward. If you publish a paper in a regular SSCI- or CSSCI-indexed journal, you will receive a 10,000−20,000 yuan reward. In order to break the hegemony of SSCI and CSSCI, many universities have begun to include other indexes in their evaluation system, such as the Chinese Core Journal List (developed by Peking University in 1992), the Journal Citation Report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other journal evaluation systems (Huang et al., 2021). Most public universities in China have an office called the Office of Scientific Research, listing journals both in Chinese and English and with scales of evaluation of those journals. The practice of my university is that the office will send a message to all faculty members before they update the list and ask for suggestions as to which journals should be included. At present, in most universities in China there is no tenure, but rather a contract system. Every 4 years, all teachers will sign a contract with the university assigning a certain amount of teaching and research and publishing tasks. If one fails to complete the tasks, they might be punished by salary deduction or relocation to a nonteaching or research position. There is a system of evaluation for promotion from a teaching or research assistant position up to a full professor position. These evaluation scores will affect one's promotion, as well as financial benefits. At the end of a year, universities usually give incentive bonuses according to the scores provided by the Office of Scientific Research. The evaluation system in Chinese universities is a recent development regulated by the Ministry of Education in China. It is a part of the reforms that the Ministry of Education has conducted since the 1980s. Before the 1980s, there was no such evaluation system. At that time, promotion was primarily based on the number of years one worked for the university; once one was employed in a university, one would not be fired and would be promoted steadily. The criteria for promotion have indeed changed since then. I have spoken with younger teachers about changing evaluation systems. They believe that the current evaluation system is better because it is more transparent. They know the scores they get from their publications and research grants and can compare their scores with others' scores when they compete for promotion. My younger colleagues told me that they were not under direct pressure to publish papers in SSCI-listed journals, but rather in CSSCI-listed journals, which they must do. To publish in English in SSCI-listed journals is encouraged and can bring rewards but is less immediately necessary. My younger colleagues told me that the quality of their papers or books did not matter much; quantity is more important than quality. Unless they apply for a job in another university or compete for awards, their articles or books will not be evaluated by other anthropologists. In Hong Kong, there is great pressure for anthropology professors to publish. The only anthropology department in Hong Kong is at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), although there are anthropologists in most of Hong Kong's eight public universities. Each year we must each compile our individual annual reports. In publications, to "exceed expectations," one must in a given year publish "1 journal article or book chapter of international excellence or high-impact; or 2 journal articles or book chapters of international reputation or with potential for high-impact." What "high-impact" means is not defined. Anthropology belongs to the Faculty of Arts at CUHK. This means that SSCI is not used as a measure by which to judge journals, although it is used in the Faculty of Social Science at CUHK. In the Faculty of Arts, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) is also not used. This is largely because the Faculty contains such a wide range of scholars—from poets to linguists to historians to artists to composers—that no single set of citation indexes could cover them all. Furthermore, many professors in the arts primarily publish books rather than articles, which are not measured by many citation indexes. Professors have very persistently protested against being judged in terms of whether their publications fit the criteria of being in citation indexes, and so these measures are not used. An effect of this system is to evaluate publications not by quality, but by quantity; professors can be quite sure that higher-ups, at least beyond their own department, have not actually read anything that they have written. Because this rating system operates each year, an anthropologist cannot simply focus on writing a book over the years but must also have a regular stream of shorter publications. Yearly rankings are part of the process whereby professors are evaluated for tenure and promotion. In some recent years, as many as half of the candidates for tenure (known as "substantiation" in Hong Kong, typically applied for in one's fifth year) have failed to receive it in the Faculty of Arts; in anthropology, when an assistant professor received tenure a few years ago, it was the first time in well over a decade, after several denials, that any anthropology professor had obtained tenure. The largest barrier to tenure is not at the department level but at the faculty level and university level, with decisions made by senior university committees. The key to success or failure in the tenure application is the evaluations of four or five external referees, who are partly chosen by the department and partly by higher-ups in the university. SSCI does not factor into these ratings, but one key in referees' ratings will be the purported quality of the journals and publishers who publish the candidate's work. The publications of an anthropologist pursuing tenure generally must be in English. If a professor seeks to publish in Chinese for a local or a national audience, this will generally not count for much, both because publications in Chinese are sometimes deemed to have insufficient refereeing and because many of the anthropological experts who judge tenure applications do not read Chinese. Every 6 years, a research assessment exercise (RAE) is conducted at CUHK, by which academics' research is assessed in Hong Kong by a panel of international experts in one's discipline. The RAE does not have direct relevance for an individual anthropologist's fate but has enormous weight at the departmental level: some 25% of the department's budget is determined by performance in the RAE. The RAE claims to evaluate Chinese-language research by the same standard that they evaluate English-language research, but it is believed by almost all Hong Kong academics that Chinese-language research is in fact at a distinct disadvantage. Hong Kong is obsessed with university rankings. These range from being in the top 50 in the world to in the top 2