The “Publish or Perish” Phenomenon: Origins and Evolution

The question of the origin of the phrase "publish or perish" was first raised by Eugene Garfield (1925 - 2017) in 1996. The date of the first publication using the phrase is now set at 1928, when the work of the sociologist Clarence Marsh Case (1874-1946) was published, although Isaiah Bowman (1878 – 1950) in 1934 and Robert Speight (1867 – 1949) in 1935 were convinced that the phrase was used by the American geographer William Morris Davis (1850 – 1934) in 1904. We found a German-language work by the Swiss historian Werner Kaegi (1901 - 1979), published in 1973, which noted that the phrase in question was used by the Swiss historian of art and culture Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (1818 - 1897). Taking into account the years of this scholar's life, we moved the upper limit of the phrase's use from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 19th century, and also shifted the area of its origin from America to Europe. We shifted the meaning of the phrase "publish or perish" from its positive meaning (unpublished knowledge perishes) to a negative one, when a scientist's career progression depends on the number of publications. It is shown that the change in the meaning of this phrase from a wish for scientists to publish their new results to a dictum elevated to the rank of university policy is associated with the President of Harvard University (1933 - 1953) James Bryant Conant (1893 - 1978). It is proposed to include the approximate date of origin of the "publish or perish" phenomenon in the table of major historical milestones in the progress of open research publishing proposed by J.P. Tennant et al. in 2016. In conclusion, the reflection on the "publish or perish" phenomenon has allowed us to construct a cyclical scheme of the birth and death of knowledge, from oral knowledge to digital and open access knowledge.