The Nigerian factor, otherwise called “the Nigerian Way,” is a term used to refer to the defeatist attitude of most Nigerians in the face of Nigeria’s perverted value system. It is used to describe the intense moral decay or mental corruption which has seriously affected the Nigerian society to the extent what is “universally” viewed as reprehensible is paradoxically accepted in the Nigerian context as working and efficacious. In other words, it is the tendency of believing that anything—morally good or bad—can go in Nigeria, because the country is in a severe state of social malady.
Published in Chapter:
The Effects of the “Publish or Perish Syndrome” on Research and Innovation in Nigerian Universities: Insights From Recent Research and Case Studies
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-6310-5.ch005
Abstract
The pressure to publish rapidly and constantly is a phenomenon engulfing academia in all countries of the globe. It has, over the years, affected research and innovation in a mostly negative way. In Nigerian universities in particular, this culture has mainly been a syndrome, manifested by (1) the urge among faculty members to publish more for promotions and positions than for genuine research production, (2) publishing for purely capitalistic motivations, (3) the use of unorthodox methodologies to boost citation index, and (4) fictive authorship of research works among others. All these objectionable practices have been responsible for various forms of decay in research and teaching in the Nigerian university system. They have, for instance, made plagiarism, data mining, predatory journals, duplicate publications, among other challenges, pervade research in Nigerian universities, causing innovation to remain more an ideal than a reality in these tertiary institutions. Using empirical understandings and critical observations, this chapter illustrates all these issues.