Why Is There an Emphasis on Publishing in Graduate School? (Part I)

Comments about academic publishing

Jun 23, 2025

As a graduate student, I'm sure you know that learning how to write and publish your research is a fundamental component of graduate-level education. Many graduate programs (such as CSU’s) stipulate an expected number of publications before defending a thesis or dissertation. At the same time however, the process of publication can be challenging in many ways (particularly for your first paper). In this article I elaborate on the “why” behind publication, for anyone who may be struggling with motivation.

The comments that follow are meant to clarify the true purpose of publishing your research and why it an essential part of graduate training.

1. Building a set of persistent research artifacts

Publishing is how you begin establishing expertise in a technical field. I’m defining “expertise” here as deep conceptual understanding of a topic, which allows you to meaningfully refine, extend, critique, offer better alternative(s), or even upend an existing model or theory. Your publications are where you demonstrate that expertise.

While you’re in graduate school, take the opportunity to publish as much as you reasonably can, beyond any requirements for graduation. I know you’re thinking, “Of course you would say that as my advisor!” Yes, but why? I don’t need another paper, and I certainly won’t get a bonus next year for it, even if you publish 10 papers. It’s to benefit you—it’s your professional vita. In graduate school, you have a unique situation where your advisor wants you to publish and they’re also offering to teach you how to publish.

Publishing is a complex skill that’s learned iteratively. On your first paper, I’ll guide you step-by-step. On the second, maybe you’re doing 25-30% on your own, and so on. The ideal outcome is that by the time you defend your dissertation, you can independently lead and publish your own research. This defines what a Ph.D. is trained to do. The process includes: conception of a new research idea, structuring a research plan, efficiently executing the research, validating it, writing a paper to document the findings, and getting it published in a reputable journal. You have to go through this several times to refine and build confidence in the skill.

Hopefully you can see why you want to take advantage of the personalized training you receive in graduate school, by solving as many research problems and publishing the results (i.e., training iterations) as you can.

Personal anecdote. Growing up, I always loved writing, English classes, etc. However, after I wrote my first few research papers, my advisor essentially threw out almost everything I’d written. I assumed (correctly) that he was only trying to teach me a skill—one I knew he’d already mastered—but I remember that my pride was a little wounded. I knew I could write a good English essay. I’d taken a course in technical communication as an undergraduate. What I didn’t realize though was just how specialized the writing is for a technical journal article. I’ll take this subject up again in the future, but for now, here is one aspect of high-level technical writing: it is completely descriptive. It doesn’t contain superfluous, ambiguous, or colloquial words. The purpose is not to entertain, but objectively describe.

The persistency of a publication is something you should always keep in mind. A publication will be forever “attached” to you; it’s your eternal intellectual claim and record. The very fact of this persistence should motivate you to ensure all your publications are very high quality. (What high quality means here is multi-faceted; I’ll elaborate on this more later.) You may think some of my edits of your papers are very exacting. Why? Because it will be around forever, and have both of our names attached to it!

2. Organizing your thoughts

A perhaps understated, but highly valuable outcome of learning how to write academic publications is that it will force you to become extremely adept at organizing your thoughts and expressing them succinctly and precisely. In some sense, it can be viewed as learning to write with high information density.

You may find it amusing that I insist you write an “old school” outline before writing a paper. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t do it myself; I never attempt to write a journal article without thinking through and establishing the logical structure and flow of the paper using an outline. As a side-benefit, an outline compartmentalizes writing tasks (e.g., “Today, I’m only going to focus on describing the case studies.”). You may find this helps you fend off the pernicious enemy of all graduate students: procrastination.