#014 Stop Asking "Where Will This Publish?" Start Asking "Who Needs This?"

Stop Asking "Where Will This Publish?" Start Asking "Who Needs This?"

Your university has at least three boxes for you to tick: Academic Output. Pathway to Impact. Public Engagement.

Three separate reporting systems. Three different strategies. Three sets of metrics that rarely talk to each other.

It's bureaucratic nonsense, and it's making research worse.

The Journal Trap

We've built an entire system around a simple assumption: if research matters, it appears in a peer-reviewed journal. Preferably a prestigious one. Ideally with a high impact factor.

This isn't about quality control. It's about risk management. Universities want measurable, defensible evidence of research quality. Journals provide that. They're convenient proxies for "good research" because they're standardised, countable, and someone else has already done the evaluation.

But this creates a fundamental distortion. We've confused the vessel with the voyage. The journal isn't the research—it's just one potential format for sharing it.

And increasingly, it's the wrong format for much of what we need to accomplish.

The categories are artificial

Academic Output: Your papers, monographs, chapters. Impact: How your work changes policy, practice, or understanding outside academia. Public Engagement: How you communicate with non-specialist audiences.

Universities love these distinctions. They make annual reviews straightforward. They create clear targets. They allow administrators to measure productivity across diverse disciplines.

They're also completely divorced from how meaningful research actually works.

Take any research project that genuinely matters—work that shifts understanding or changes practice. It doesn't sit neatly in one category. It exists simultaneously as rigorous scholarship, practical intervention, and public conversation.

The problem isn't that we need better definitions of these categories. The problem is the categories themselves.

The Cost of compartmentalisation

When you're trained to think in these boxes, you make counterproductive decisions:

You write for Journal of Obscure Studies instead of creating resources practitioners actually need.

You craft arguments for academic gatekeepers rather than the communities your research serves.

You separate "the research" from "the communication of research" as if they're distinct activities.

You delay public engagement until after publication, when the work could benefit from dialogue during development.

You spend months reformatting the same research for different "outputs" instead of creating genuinely different knowledge products.

Worst of all: you assess the success of your work by whether it got published, not whether it mattered.

Anti-Journal Doesn't Mean Anti-Rigour

This isn't an argument against peer review or academic standards. It's an argument against treating journals as the only legitimate form of research output.

Some research belongs in journals. Some doesn't. Some belongs in journals and elsewhere simultaneously.

I'm installing an exhibition in Accra this week on West African commercial architecture from the pre and post-independence era. It's understudied, often dismissed, architecturally significant.

Is it output? Yes—it presents research findings through curated visual analysis and spatial argument.

Is it impact? Yes—it contributes to heritage conversations in West Africa in ways a journal never could.

Is it public engagement? Yes—it reaches audiences who would never read an academic article but who live with this architecture daily.

It's all three. And trying to separate them would weaken the work.

The research exists in this format because this format serves the knowledge and the audience. Not because I'm "translating" journal articles into public-friendly versions.

A Different Framework

It’s not about "Which category does this fit?"

Instead -

Who needs to know this? Not "who might read this journal" but genuinely: whose understanding, practice, or decisions would benefit from this knowledge?

What format serves that audience? Sometimes it's a paper. Sometimes it's a policy brief, design toolkit, exhibition, documentary, dataset, or workshop. The format should serve the knowledge and the audience, not the REF submission.

What difference can it make? Impact isn't something you add after research. It's a question you ask before you begin: what changes if this research succeeds?

What conversations does this enable? Research isn't a broadcast. It's the beginning of dialogue. What discussions become possible because this knowledge now exists?

Realities

I know what you're thinking: this sounds excellent until your annual review when you need to demonstrate outputs, or when you're applying for jobs and the application form has a box labelled "peer-reviewed publications."

I'm not suggesting you ignore these systems. I'm suggesting you stop letting them constrain your thinking about what research can be.

Do both?

Write the journal article and create the practitioner guide. Present at the academic conference and run the community workshop. Publish in the peer-reviewed journal and write the accessible synthesis. It’s not much more work, and the benefits are worth it.

But don't treat the journal article as the "real" output and everything else as "engagement." They're all outputs. They're all research. They serve different purposes for different audiences.

PhD Students

Your PhD will be examined as a thesis. That's not changing. But the research that goes into that thesis can generate multiple outputs simultaneously.

Your interviews could become a podcast series while also forming your data chapters. Your literature review could become a public-facing explainer of why this topic matters. Your findings could inform a toolkit while also forming your discussion chapter.

None of this diminishes the thesis. It extends the reach and utility of the research.

The invisible curriculum includes this: no one teaches you that research can exist in multiple formats simultaneously. You're taught to write the thesis, get it examined, then maybe think about "other outputs" later.

By then, you've missed opportunities to engage audiences during the research process, when their input might have strengthened your work.

Established Researchers

You have more freedom than PhD students, but you also face more explicit pressure to publish in "the right journals."

The question is whether you're using that freedom or allowing yourself to be constrained by systems designed for administrative convenience rather than research quality.

Some of the most significant research contributions I've witnessed came from colleagues who asked "what does this knowledge need to become?" rather than "where will this publish?"

They still published. But they also created exhibitions, influenced policy, trained practitioners, built archives, developed methodologies that others could use, and changed how entire fields understood their objects of study.

Their work didn't fit neatly into the three boxes. It sprawled across them. That's what made it matter.

What would your research look like if you designed it for maximum utility rather than maximum publishability?

Not instead of publishing. In addition to publishing. Or perhaps with publishing as one component of a larger knowledge-creation strategy.

What formats would you use? What audiences would you prioritise? What conversations would you enable?

The categories exist for administrative reporting. They're not intellectual frameworks. They're not quality measures. They're bureaucratic infrastructure.

Don't let them determine what research you create or how you share it.

Your work is too important to fit neatly into boxes.

Resources & Next Steps

If you're interested in temporary research/AI roles - I've been working with Mercor on positions for PhD students and researchers. Many of my readers have found these valuable for bridging funding gaps or gaining industry experience. If you're interested, applications take 15-20 minutes: https://work.mercor.com/?referralCode=6578187f-cfd6-41b3-84a4-0d34eeeac960&utm_source=referral&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=platform_referral

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Thanks for reading. See you next time.

Iain