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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the English for publication purpose practices of doctoral students in Iran. The overall objective was to explore their motives, hurdles and strategies in academic writing. Design/methodology/approach This case study draws on a narrative inquiry to explore nine science and engineering doctoral students’ perceptions of academic publication. The data were analyzed through a hybrid process of inductive and deductive thematic analysis. Findings The qualitative results showed three dominant themes, namely: motives for publication, hurdles to publication and strategies for dealing with these challenges were extracted. The main sources of motives were students’ desire to publish their works for their graduation, improve their resume, satiate the universities’ evaluation system, and finally share their knowledge worldwide. Their hurdles included: political reasons, language-related problems, center-periphery priorities and the lack of academic writing instruction. In order to overcome these hurdles, the participants employed some strategies in academic writing. Research limitations/implications Due to qualitative nature of this study, only nine PhD students were recruited and therefore the research results are not intended to render generalizability. Besides, only narratives were employed to collect the required data. Future researchers can use surveys to collect more data. Practical implications The findings are discussed within English for academic purposes discourse and some recommendations are provided to alleviate the plights of non-native-English-speaking academic writers. Originality/value The methodology and the higher education context in which this paper was conducted are new to the literature.

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