PUBLISH OR PERISH? A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW ON FILIPINO GRADUATE STUDENTS' CHALLENGES TO PUBLICATION

The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) in the Philippines has issued Memorandum 15, Series of 2019 requiring master’s and doctoral students to publish at least one research article in a refereed publication or a nationally/internationally indexed journal before they earn their graduate degree. Years thereafter, the research productivity of graduate students in the country remains low in terms of completed research, presentations, publications, and citations. There also remains a lack of studies examining the challenges faced by graduate students in their path to academic publishing. The researcher, thus, engaged in the substantive task of systematically providing an inventory of relevant studies as guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. After a two-level screening process, eleven (11) local studies published from 2019 to 2024 were analyzed to identify the research and publication issues of graduate students and provide recommendations. To this end, four major challenges were identified: institutional and policy challenges, research readiness, publication process challenges, and time and resource limitations. Based on the survey of literature, the researcher puts forward the following recommendations: implementing mentorship programs, organizing research capability-building initiatives, fostering research communities, offering financial assistance and incentives, and improving access to publication resources and information. This review emphasizes the pressing need for graduate school institutions to create supportive environments and targeted interventions to equip graduate students for successful publication. Addressing these challenges is vital to fostering a more inclusive and productive academic research culture in the Philippines.