Imagine that you are a scientist and you apparently found a discovery solely by yourself. It would be a life-changing moment, right? Then you decided to put those findings in a certain peer-reviewed journal and it was successfully published! Congratulations!

Then… what? Is it a life-changing moment? Yes, but if you are a scientist/lecturer/professor in Indonesia, unfortunately that paper can’t be used for your promotion. Yes, you can’t. Let’s say you are in the position of an Assoc. Prof. and, in order to get promoted to Professor, there are several administrative stages that you have to follow and be accompanied by. One of them is several publications.

It doesn’t seem weird, so what is the caveat after all? Well, in the newest Decree No. 39/M/KEP/2026 from the Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, single-author papers can’t be used for promotion, regardless of the discipline. That’s it. How ironic that is. It indirectly tells you that your (solo) work can’t be recognized.

This blog is based on a paper I SOLELY authored, published in Journal of Academic Ethics: Your Academic Career Depends on Your Co-Authors: When Single-Author Papers Do Not Count in Indonesia’s Academic Promotion System. If you want a copy of the paper, just email me!

The exclusion of single-author journal articles

The controversial passage of this decree is in Part D, item 5(a)¹, which reads:

“The provisions of the special requirement are that the work is not single-authored, is not research derived from the applicant’s thesis or dissertation or from that of students under their supervision, possesses novelty, and is a scholarly work not published by the applicant’s home institution.”

See? “… the work is not single-authored …”

A single-author article still earns credit toward the promotion threshold. It just cannot serve as a qualifying publication. So you can publish only as a sole author, collect far more credit than the next rank requires, and still not be promoted. Credit comes from many activities, but the qualifying publications have to be exact: a set number of articles, in journals of a set tier, with you in a set author position.

So you must hold the lead position and still not be alone on the paper.

The collaborative driver assumptions

It is true that Indonesian academics today are forced to collaborate in research, either with intra- and international collaborators, in order to reach global networks. This did not start with the decree. Since 2014, policy has pushed for international competitiveness: a target of getting more universities into the world’s top 500, rewards for high-impact publications, and publication quotas for senior academics.

The decree gives no reason for the single-author rule, but the likely intention is to increase collaborative and international publication and to discourage isolated publishing. Overall, it sounds like “if you want your children to eat more vegetables, then you stop them from eating candy.”

The trouble is that a rule can make co-authorship compulsory, but it cannot make collaboration happen.

Global situation in authorship practices

All disciplines are likely to expand their authorship in every way, especially STEM and health-related studies. Social sciences and humanities have also increased, but they are still below STEM and health-related studies.

In STEM and health fields, three or more authors is typical². One chemistry journal went from a single author on about half of its articles between 1890 and 1910 to an average of 6.87 authors by 2022³. Part of this is necessity: instruments, large datasets, and expertise that no one person has. The social sciences and humanities moved differently, mostly from books to journal articles⁴. Large surveys and digital humanities projects are collaborative, while archival and theoretical work is often still done by one person. Nevertheless, this global situation is not saying that single-author papers are no more. It just happened naturally.

3 unanswered chain of logic questions

So with that,

1. why did this unrecognizing statement in that decree come up to the surface? What is the urgency, really?
2. Based on what are single-author papers not in the same position as others?
3. Well, in the first place, why did they come up with this conclusion, which excludes single-author papers?

I could not find the answers in the decree. It gives no rationale, AT ALL.

Since the candidate must be the first author, a name in the middle position helps no one. Honorary and guest authors are useless here, because senior academics need lead positions for their own promotions. What the rule creates instead is demand for names that do not compete for the lead: junior colleagues, research assistants, supervised staff, and peers who trade places (each leads their own qualifying article and appears as a member on the others).

Imagine a scholar who finished an article alone. It earns credit but does nothing for her promotion, so she/he adds a colleague who faces the same rule and is happy to return the favor. No journal would detect anything.

We have seen this kind of response before. After Indonesia introduced SINTA, the national research ranking system, the average team size on journal publications rose by about 13%⁵, even though SINTA never required plurality. A rule that makes co-authorship a precondition will probably do more.

What we can’t see under the paper’s authorship

Authorship in academic practice is undeniably hard to define. Different cultures/labs/departments/etc. have their own treatment to comply with authorship (even though authorship has been defined by certain predetermined rules like ICMJE and COPE).

In some labs, the PI sets strict rules, and anyone who touched the manuscript becomes an author. In others, only the person who wrote the draft and led the project is listed. Both exist.

ICMJE asks for four things together: a substantial contribution to the work, drafting or revising it, approval of the final version, and agreement to be accountable for it⁶. The decree checks none of this. It looks at author position and author count, both visible on the byline without opening the paper. It asks for no contribution statement and no confirmation that a co-author did anything._ So at assessment, a name earned through real work and a name added to meet the requirement look the same. _ Journals do ask authors to affirm their contributions, but that declaration comes after the authors have already settled the arrangement between themselves. It records what the authors say happened. Under this rule, what the byline records is compliance, not contribution.

The decree wants collaboration, but all it can check is a name on a byline. It rewards the scholar who adds a colleague to a finished paper and sets aside the one who really did the work alone. It never asks who wrote, who analyzed, or who answers for the paper when it turns out to be wrong. A rule that counts names cannot tell who did the work. It can only make sure there are more names, and every name added for compliance makes the byline, our one tool for tracing responsibility, less trustworthy.

At the end, this specific part of the decree is sloppy exactly where it should be careful. It gives no reason for banning single-author articles, and it offers no argument for exempting the arts while leaving the social sciences and humanities out. It sets journal quartile thresholds to two decimal places, then asks nothing about who actually did the research. And it turns padded author lists from a quiet bad habit into the compliant response to a state regulation, which leaves the scholar who refuses to add a name as the one out of step with policy. A regulation this exact about numbers and this careless about integrity does not strengthen Indonesian research. It sidelines honest solo work and gives every shortcut a reason to exist.