Although doctoral students are increasingly expected or required to publish during their candidature, few studies have focused specifically on how they manage to do so while juggling multiple, and often competing, demands from their busy doctoral studies. This study set out to bridge this gap by examining the strategies adopted by four Chinese nursing doctoral students to deal with the time pressure in meeting institutional publication requirements, and the impacts of the publication requirements and the strategies on their scholarly publishing experiences and practices. Drawing on activity theory and its notions of "boundary crossing," "boundary object," and "contradiction," the study revealed that to fulfill institutional publication requirements amid competing demands from their doctoral studies, the students employed two main coping strategies: boundary crossing through starting early and refashioning the scholarly publishing activity through orchestrating one's research and publication with those of others. It also found that, although effective in mitigating time pressure and boosting publication output, the strategies tended to undermine the students' aspirations to participate fully in scholarly publishing and to join the disciplinary community. The implications of these findings for doctoral publication are discussed.