From Publication Pressure to Collective Scholarly Practice: Indonesian Lecturers’ Involvement in Communities of Practice for Publishing in Reputable Journals

Muhammad Basri (Universitas Negeri Makassar)

ELT Worldwide: Journal of English Language Teaching
Vol 13, No 2 (2026)

This study explores Indonesian lecturers’ involvement in communities of practice for publishing in reputable journals. In Indonesia, publication in SINTA-, Scopus-, and Web of Science-indexed journals has become increasingly tied to academic promotion, lecturer performance reporting, institutional accreditation, and university visibility. Using an interpretive qualitative design, this study drew on semi-structured interviews with 31 lecturers and researchers from public and private universities across diverse disciplines and academic ranks. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis, which enabled the construction of themes attentive to both semantic accounts and latent institutional meanings. The findings show that publication-oriented communities of practice functioned as survival mechanisms within a metric-driven academic system, while also serving as culturally resonant spaces of gotong royong, musyawarah, peer mentoring, and collaborative authorship. Participants used these communities to manage publication anxiety, strengthen academic writing, access methodological expertise, validate journal choices, use digital and generative AI tools, and build scholarly confidence. However, the study also reveals that these communities were not automatically egalitarian. They were shaped by seniority-based authorship politics, gendered participation barriers, article processing charge constraints, tokenistic institutional workshops, disciplinary inequalities, and epistemic pressures to reframe local Indonesian knowledge for global journals. The study contributes a critical and culturally situated understanding of publication-oriented communities of practice in Indonesian higher education. It argues that such communities can enhance publication readiness and scholarly identity only when supported by ethical authorship norms, inclusive facilitation, institutional funding, and recognition of locally grounded scholarship across diverse national career stages and institutional contexts.