When promotion becomes a bounty on publications: how academic reward systems shape publication behavior, with lessons from Nepal.

Abstract

The criteria institutions use to appoint and promote academics shape how science is produced. Where advancement is tied tightly to publication counts, researchers respond rationally to the incentive, and publication behavior shifts toward volume. This article uses the faculty-promotion regulations of Tribhuvan University, Nepal's largest higher education institution, as a worked example of how publication-weighted criteria may reward output over scientific merit. The framework allocates the majority of open-competition marks to research publications, sets minimum article counts for promotion, fractionates credit by authorship position, and scores articles by journal tier. Such a structure illustrates a problem common across many low- and middle-income academic systems: it can encourage fragmented, lower-quality output, penalize collaborative authorship, and use journal-based metrics as surrogates for individual article quality, contrary to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. The institution's existing anti-plagiarism and anti-predatory safeguards show that meaningful reform is achievable. Drawing on DORA, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors authorship criteria, and Committee on Publication Ethics guidance, the article argues for a phased shift toward portfolio-based assessment that rewards the quality, integrity, and relevance of scholarship rather than the counting of papers.