You don't need to 'publish and hope' — you need to build trust.
Like many ECRs and PhD candidates, I also believed that all you had to do was do great research and publish it. If you want to “make it”, you’re either following this mantra, i.e. trying to publish as much as you can, crank up your h-index and citations, or you have a less-known strategy that works for you.
If you’re the latter, great! Otherwise, you could also just be wasting your time.
For the rest of us, I’ll attempt to convince you, in this letter, that turning yourself into a paper factory is a 90s game that’s no longer an effective strategy.
In a world where information is scarce, attention is cheap. You can reasonably expect that your great idea or insight would eventually be discovered and translated into impact. This is the world most academics still live in. The person who doesn’t need to chase attention is powerful. But waiting also signals purity. “I’m not self-promoting or trying too hard to sell my work. Since it’s the truth and it matters, it will be found.”
If you do great work, the world will find you.
So everyone is almost exclusively focused on doing great research and waiting.
Wait for 6 months for the peer review
Wait for permission from the journal to share your knowledge
Wait for algorithms and search engines to distribute your research
Wait for the media to invite comments on an important issue
Wait for seniority → to be a prof in 15 years so you can speak to issues, be respected and attain recognition.
Wait for government and industry partners to invite you to the table
Is that an effective strategy?
In a world where information, insights and expertise are scarce, productivity in itself is valuable. That’s basic economics.
Ideas, insights and expertise aren’t scarce anymore. In the abundance of information, getting eyeballs becomes the bottleneck. Indeed, we’re overwhelmed.
In the 1990s, ~ 800k research papers were published annually. By 2022, we crossed 5.2 million/year. That number isn’t going to slow down. The velocity is accelerating fast.
Productivity is becoming cheap!
In the first year of YouTube’s launch, about 20k videos were uploaded daily. Today, it’s 20 million per day. That’s 7.3 billion uploads per year.
Anyone with a phone can create a YouTube video today. And for academics, anyone with an LLM can write a paper. In one study, LLMs increased researcher productivity by 89%. The point I want to emphasise is that this is still in the early days. ChatGPT only showed up in 2022. Imagine 15 years from now!
There are, of course, lousy YouTube videos, just as there are already AI-slop publications. But that’s not the point. Distinguishing your work from the sea of publications isn’t getting any easier. That arms-length signal of your expertise and credibility is getting noisy.
Last year, a colleague reached out. He was shortlisted for a fantastic industry job. “Congratulations”, I said. He was sceptical. The employer wanted to interview his referees. It’s a strange. But after an hour of interviewing his referees, the 3-member panel made its decision. He wasn’t even interviewed. That’s not normal. But it’s revealing. Arms-length trust is losing credibility, and employers are adapting.
This takes me to my main thesis of this letter. Trust-building and distribution have become the new currency.
This is what you get when you combine transaction cost economics with Herbert Simon.
Publishing without distribution is the quiet new graveyard for research. And this is worsening fast. The unit economics are particularly detrimental to PhD students and ECRs. If anyone with AI can generate 20 papers, the old mantra of becoming a productive researcher becomes a noisy signal.
The context has changed.
If you’re an ECR and PhD student who wants more impact, you have to play a different game.
You can either play the 1990s game today (the “waiting game”) or strategically evolve. You can wait to be invited to the media, industry, or government to share your knowledge and create impact. But that invitation queue is extremely long. All your professors and beyond are in that queue. When will it be your turn? You can wait for permission from journals to distribute your work. But the volume of publications means yours might be found. Who navigates to pg. 5 of Google Scholar to find a paper?
Roughly 3% of PhDs become professors. If you’re waiting to become a professor first before your knowledge translates into something tangible, it’s going to be a long wait that you might not be able to afford. You may never get the invitation to the table to share your expertise because insights aren’t scarce anymore. So, your greatest work could go unnoticed.
Maybe that bus may never arrive in time, leading to frustration.
The alternative is not waiting for stars to align in your favour.
Not doing great research only and hoping that it’ll magically translate into jobs, income, impact, prestige, and freedom. The profs will likely receive invitations to the few seats at the table.
Don’t get me wrong. Waiting is still culturally prestigious in academia. It’s institutional ideology. But if your entire strategy is to “publish and hope”, you’re betting your career on being discovered and trusted in a world where the sea is extremely crowded.
The real cost of waiting is that your best work goes unnoticed. Years of genuine insight quietly buried. You don’t get invited to the table, and your work doesn’t turn into opportunities.
The old metrics are still crucial. But in themselves aren’t enough anymore. In the emerging environment, deliberately building distribution and trust is also crucial. Once you realise this, thriving also requires owning a direct channel to the people your work is supposed to serve. I have been building mine—not relying solely on journals and Google Scholar to distribute my work, but something I can control.
Distribution + trust makes you an amphibious car.
Publishing is typically a black box. People only see the final output - the published paper, not the hard work and judgments. As AI use intensifies, having a great paper doesn’t necessarily mean you did the work or that it reflects your expertise. You must also build visible proofs of expertise and work to show your competence to those who matter to your career progress. By so doing, you’re making it cheaper for people to trust you.
The final point, and probably the most crucial, is this. If impersonal trust is noisy, personal trust takes centre stage. If you have no one willing to be interviewed for an hour on your credibility and expertise, you have some work to do. Someone must be willing to defend your work to strangers.