The four paper rule: Publish or go unpaid

As far as I can tell from the TU Delft doctoral regulations, nowhere does it state that ‘four first-author papers’ is a fixed requirement for graduation. Yet, if you ask almost any PhD candidate what they need in order to finish, you’ll hear them count up to four from their most recent publication. It’s a deeply embedded part of the culture here at TU Delft that many of us internalise, even if supervisors never say it explicitly.

Of course, I’m not claiming that we shouldn’t strive to publish. Publications can be motivating. Peer review can sharpen your critical thinking and improve the work (when it is not lazy, or rushed or obviously AI-generated). But turning publication counts into a threshold for graduation creates a system where the risk is borne by the person in the most precarious position: the PhD candidate.

If you don’t hit the magic four by the end of your contract, what happens?

If you don’t hit the magic four by the end of your contract, what happens? More often than not, you continue doing the PhD. Sometimes, without pay. And what about those who lose their visa to stay in the Netherlands? It’s hard to call this a deliberate choice when the alternative is considered failure.

At least HR seems to be waking up to the fact that certain contract constructions around ‘hospitality’ and extensions are not a sustainable, or legally comfortable, solution. Though even if these are being corrected, the pressure might actually worsen now, if the culture still expects four papers in a shorter space of time.

In a recent survey on well-being in our department, time pressure and publication goals were named as major causes of stress for PhD candidates. This really isn’t about individual resilience. It’s about incentives.

Incentives matter most when things don’t go smoothly. When a paper gets rejected, you revise it, you resubmit it, you try again. That’s science. But after the seventh rejection, the process can start feeling like roulette. Not necessarily because the research is bad, but because peer review is slow, inconsistent, and sometimes shaped by trends or gatekeeping.

In conversations with friends doing PhDs at other Dutch universities, I’ve learned that expectations are varied: fewer papers, more emphasis on teaching, or open scientific outputs. TU Delft rightly prides itself on high standards. In my opinion these standards are more likely to be met by the one paper you’re proud of, than four you rushed through.

Of course there need to be checks and balances, you don’t get a PhD for ‘just’ showing up. There’s a difference though between academic rigour and an unspoken pressure that everyone experiences and just accepts as ‘part of the PhD’. Normalising something harmful doesn’t make it acceptable; it only makes it more difficult to challenge. This reminds me of how women are sometimes told to treat harassment as inevitable, and the blame is diffused to the system. I don’t have the solution for changing this system. Maybe we can start with transparency: if we don’t call a publication quota a requirement in writing, why do we treat it like one in practice?