The Publish-or-Perish Culture as a Threat to Academic Integrity and Innovation in Higher Education.

The article examines how the "publish-or-perish" culture threatens academic integrity, innovation, and wellbeing in higher education, focusing on a qualitative case study at a university in Harare, Zimbabwe. It finds that pressures to produce frequent publications lead to emotional and psychological strain among lecturers and postgraduate students, foster unethical practices such as plagiarism and fragmented research, suppress creativity by encouraging safe, conventional topics, and increase reliance on predatory journals due to financial and structural constraints. These dynamics also undermine graduate training and research quality, resulting in low-quality outputs and compromised academic standards. The study situates these local findings within broader regional and global contexts and advocates for integrating Ubuntu philosophy—which emphasizes communal responsibility and ethical scholarship—and Education 5.0 principles to promote responsible, innovative, and socially relevant research practices.