Beyond Q1 Mandates: Metrics, Peer Review, and the Political Economy of Doctoral Research Certification

Abstract

This article critically examines the growing institutional requirement that doctoral and postdoctoral researchers publish their work in Q1-ranked academic journals as a condition of degree completion or academic advancement. Drawing on the philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge, higher education policy, and the political economy of publishing, the article interrogates three interconnected problems. First, it analyses the institutional logic by which universities have progressively outsourced their own research quality-assurance function to commercially operated journal-ranking systems, tracing this shift to the metrics-based accountability frameworks that emerged globally from the 1980s onward. Second, it challenges the epistemological assumptions underpinning the Q1 certification model, arguing that quartile rankings measure citation-based institutional prestige rather than intrinsic research quality, and that the peer review process, despite its indispensable role, is systemically constrained by reviewer knowledge limitations, availability pressures, and the inherent knowledge asymmetry between specialist researchers and generalist reviewers. Third, it analyses the structural distortion introduced by Article Processing Charges (APCs), which systematically disadvantage researchers from emerging economies and the Global South, thereby embedding financial access as a proxy for research quality within the Q1 corpus. The article develops three original analytical contributions not previously synthesized in the literature: first, a hypothetical comparison between a university-enrolled doctoral candidate and a self-taught independent researcher who achieves the same Q1 publication without institutional enrolment - used as an illustrative sample case to expose the logical contradiction of simultaneously treating Q1 publication as a definitive quality benchmark while requiring institutional enrolment to achieve it; second, a university-as-brand-certifier analogy, which demonstrates that universities outsource their operative quality determination to commercial peer reviewers while affixing their own institutional credential to the outcome; and third, a logical extension argument showing that a Q1 journal publisher offering basic research training could, by the university's own stated criteria, function as a de facto doctoral credential institution - demanding that universities rebuild a substantive, non-commercial account of what doctoral education distinctively provides. The article concludes by proposing an alternative, pluralistic model of research quality certification that restores meaningful institutional responsibility to universities while preserving the independent verification function that external review provides. Policy implications for universities in emerging economies, with particular reference to Thailand and Southeast Asia, are discussed