The growing pressure to 'publish or perish', experienced by academia around the world, has pushed an increasing number of individual graduate programmes and universities, as well as entire higher education systems, to introduce a publication requirement as a prerequisite for the conferral of doctoral degrees. One example of the implementation of the requirement at the country level is Kazakhstan. This paper sheds light on the experience with publication requirement policies implemented at the country level by using bibliometric data from Scopus to statistically explore the effects of Ph.D. publication requirement policy on publication productivity trends in Kazakhstan. The findings reveal that the policy has increased the number of publications but has lowered the impact of research. The study suggests that measures focused on methodological training and improving the research capacity of future scholars may be more effective in strengthening the research competitiveness of countries than outcome-focused policies.