Becoming a Publishing Researcher: An Autoethnographic Account of Academic Identity Formation During the PhD

This article explores how engagement with academic publishing during doctoral training shapes academic identity formation. Drawing on analytic autoethnography, the study examines my lived experiences during my PhD journey, including early encounters with academic reading, methodological challenges, repeated manuscript rejection, authorship negotiation, and collaborative research. Rather than treating publishing as a purely technical skill, the study positions it as a process of academic socialization through which doctoral researchers learn to navigate the institutional norms, hierarchies, and expectations of academic life. The findings show that becoming a publishing researcher is not a linear progression but a recursive process characterized by cycles of uncertainty, confidence, self-doubt, and emerging agency. Experiences such as rejection and methodological disorientation expose the hidden curriculum of academic publishing, including implicit expectations surrounding writing, journal fit, and authorship. By linking personal experience to broader institutional processes, this study contributes to autoethnographic scholarship by demonstrating how publishing practices shape academic identity while simultaneously reproducing, and at times enabling the renegotiation of, institutional norms and academic hierarchies. The article argues that academic publishing should be understood not only as a mechanism for disseminating knowledge but also as a formative process through which researchers learn to position themselves within academia.