I know this is a resolved old topic, but I just answered a similar question, and though my answer could help someone else as it covers other solution options:
Click events work a little differently on touch enabled devices. There is no mouse, so technically there is no click.
According to this article – http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/09/click_event_del.html – due to memory limitations, click events are only emulated and dispatched from anchor and input elements. Any other element could use touch events, or have click events manually initialized by adding a handler to the raw html element, for example, to force click events on list items:
$('li').each(function(){
this.onclick = function() {}
});
Now click will be triggered by li, therefore can be listened by jQuery.
On your case, you could just change the listener to the anchor element as very well put by @mason81, or use a touch event on the li:
$('.menu').on('touchstart', '.publications', function(){
$('#filter_wrapper').show();
});
Here is a fiddle with a few experiments – http://jsbin.com/ukalah/9/edit