That’s a tough question because even within pubs it’s hard to distinguish - first author? Case reports? Do we count both accepted/submitted/indexed?
It’s really a wide range, but less than 5 definitely stands out negatively on the low side unless they’re all first author and high quality papers in good journals. Most are probably in the 5-10 range with a few first authors and the rest middle author. So 8.5 isn’t a bad estimate actually.
They definitely aren’t always all ENT though. Many of those include middle author stuff from undergrad as well as non ent work from Med school. As for actual ent pubs, less than 3 would be low end, average 3-6.
The range can be pretty startling. With more people taking research years you’ll often see some wildly impressive CVs. I remember one guy applying when I did who had 60+ solid ent pubs, and was a really cool awesome guy on top of it. I think he was over 100 on pub Med by the end of residency. He was and still is an outlier, though it’s not uncommon to see 10-20+pubs from students who had productive research years.
The competitiveness is getting insane across all the highly desired fields. I feel like all of us on the attending side feel like we would have a hard time matching today and many of these applicants have CVs that rival many junior faculty. I have a friend who’s an attending at a very prestigious program and he had 1 first author publication when he got his position. And he’s not that old!
Times have changed.
