The ECR Journey: Beyond Publish or Perish – Cultivating Excellence in Scholarly Publishing

The 2025 BERA Early Career Researcher (ECR) Conference took place last week in Leeds and was a huge success, bringing together emerging researchers from across the UK to explore the theme Beyond Publish or Perish: Cultivating Excellence in Scholarly Publishing.

We are delighted to announce that the Best Presentation Prize was awarded to Steve Hoey from the University of Hull for his thought-provoking presentation, Is the pen mightier than the pint? Congratulations to Steve, and thank you to all who contributed to making the event such a success.

You can read Steve’s abstract below:

A PhD is a step into the unknown and my presentation will be a reflective account of how I went from talking about my passions over a pint to writing about them and sharing them to a wider audience.

There is a mountain of advice about starting to publish academic papers and sharing your research (LSE, 2020) but before we dive headfirst into any project it is always useful to step back and consider what are the real goals and what are we really trying to accomplish. By thinking about your work in connection with the fundamentals of project management, we may find more success.

The 5W1H strategy is a powerful tool that uses key questions to help us gain an understanding of a topic and make informed decisions. It is also known as the Kipling Method but it is rarely used in academic research. Almeida et al. (2020) and Lin et al. (2024) did use it to strengthen their understanding of challenging issues.

My presentation will include my personal reflections on the following:

• Who are you going to work with? Will you go alone or collaborate?
• What are you going to write about? Is it just about your PhD research?
• When is the best time and place to start? We don’t know what we don’t know!
• Where do you start publishing your work? With so many options available this is not a simple question.
• Why do you want to publish? This is the key question for consideration and it is this that motivates us to keep going when things will inevitably not go to plan.
• How do you start writing and getting published? Procrastination and imposter experience can be potential barriers.
  We want our research to reach beyond the academic world and have a greater impact. Moosa (2024) discusses the pressure to publish and our research is our offering to the world at that moment in time but we do need to be accountable and responsible for our research.
  It is always interesting to look at all the different ways we can present our research. I will share by experiences of writing for academic and non-academic publications plus alternative outlets; the peer review process; navigating ethical issues and exploring new ways of communicating my research.

The ECR Conference 2026 is now accepting abstract submissions! Find out more below