You should NOT be able to have a PhD after your name without a paper.
It's in part my personal opinion that a PhD should be about learning first and demonstrating that you have learned to do work and sell that work. We should not lose focus of that fact. When you say it's "the primary objective" is when I take offense. You might say "a primary objective" and I wouldn't have responded the way I did. I would say it's a secondary objective. Surely, it's good that your work stands up to outside criticism and it's good to get experience in the publishing process. However, If your PI/lab/committee boil down your PhD into the process of getting papers, you can be considered nothing more than a lab tech. I mean who cares if you thought of your own experiments or really learned anything when the benchmark is: did that person publish? Publishing is not
the primary objective in this sense. Nobody is going to agree you should get a PhD when you have papers but don't really understand those papers. Conversely, some would argue you can get a PhD without papers, as long as you have a good understanding of your research and field and have put in significant amounts of time demonstrating that fact. I think most care that you
learned something significant, and therefore, learning is still the benchmark. If you want to say publishing is required in addition to that, I won't take quarrel with you, but to say it's all about productivity is a dangerous line of thought in an educational system.
Now publications are one of the major benchmarks later in life. We have to accept that we are being trained to bring in grant money and part of bringing in grant money is publishing. But that's a different stage of the scientist's lifecycle. We can note significant anecdotes of people who were "unsuccessful" graduate students yet flourished later in life. One of the nobel prize winners last year had 0 publications during his PhD.
Sorry you're having trouble publishing but that's the truth.
No need to get personal. I have one paper in press and between the four other papers I've either submitted or will be submitting in the next month, I think I'll end up with a few more. I think my grant and patents will also look pretty good on my CV. But, despite the call out I really don't want to measure e-peens. The MD/PhD Radiology fellow who had several papers in PNAS and several other reputable journal papers as a PhD pretty much told me to get out of grad school as quickly as possible. This is because now that he's looking for jobs nobody cares what he did in grad school--only what he did in residency and fellowship. He's not the only MD/PhD senior to me who gave me the advice to just get done. I pushed as hard as possible for that to happen.
In the end, should someone be allowed to graduate with no papers? I think so, but it's certainly undesirable. Does it handicap your career? I doubt it. You might not get into the biggest name residency. I used to think these things mattered until I noticed that in my field many of the big name academics I looked into went to relatively no name medical schools and residency programs. In the long run fellowships, especially research fellowships and post-docs, really are not very competitive, and isn't the performance there what really counts for a new scientist? And why aren't these very competitive?? It seems most of the smartest people bailed to industry or private practice. Hmmmmmmm.............
