Number of publications during PhD

[bd4727]

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine this weekend, and we trying to come up with a ballpark estimate for how many first author publications is about average for a US Top 40 research university PhD student... anyone have any insight to this, or better have some data? Also, we were curious if this were different for MD/PhD's.

Obviously one Nature paper is different than two papers in PLoS One, and there are other confounding factors plus number alone doesn't matter, etc-- but does anyone have any data on what this number is?

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[Rouelle]

I think this is extremely variable depending on your field, and possibly even on one's specific area of emphasis in that field. For example, I am an organic chemist. If an organic grad student is working solely on reaction methodology development (finding and optimizing new reactions) and is pretty successful (this can be luck, research group, and student dependent) that student may get multiple publications each year. If the same grad student is working on the total synthesis of a moderately complex natural product, he/she may be lucky to complete after 2-3 years (or more). In such a case, a PhD student may get one or two papers from that, and maybe one or two more from random side projects. A student doing physical organic chemistry may be somewhere in between. I don't really think one can quantify the typical number of publications because there is so much variability.

One further thing, I haven't seen any data on this but I don't think student publication count is very dependent on university ranking. I went to grad school at a place known more for football than academics and then was a postdoc at a "US top 40 research university." In my two experiences, I saw no difference in numbers of student papers.

 

[bd4727]

Yes I totally understand that this is very individual/lab dependent/luck, etc. However, I would still be interested if anyone knew of some place that this number had been studied at all.

 

[Poisson]

Do foreign journals have a bad view in MD/PhD or DO/PhD applications? I am a published first author in an American surgical related journal, but have an advisor trying to push another manuscript to a clearly Chinese in the name journal as he is on the board there. Should this paper not be submitted there or should I respect the professor and continue with this?

 

[Poisson]

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine this weekend, and we trying to come up with a ballpark estimate for how many first author publications is about average for a US Top 40 research university PhD student... anyone have any insight to this, or better have some data? Also, we were curious if this were different for MD/PhD's.

Obviously one Nature paper is different than two papers in PLoS One, and there are other confounding factors plus number alone doesn't matter, etc-- but does anyone have any data on what this number is?

Depends on your lab. I would presume the average MD/PhD student would have more publications then the average PhD student because many times they are put on more high impact areas. Some areas in engineering are company driven, thus they may not want to publish as much. My professor is from the ivy league, and probably had about 5 to 10 during these years. I notice that the heavily medical/cancer focused labs publish many papers in top journals. You can be by yourself though and publish in Science, my grandpa has a long list of publications in Science and many he was the only author.

 

[gbwillner]

As others have stated, it depends on a lot of factors.
One, some programs require only 1 or 0 1st author papers for graduation, some as many as 3. This may even depend on your department and may be different within a single institution.
Two, The field plays a big difference. In the genetics department, you were expected to get about 3 1st author papers, unless you go one into Nature/Cell/Science, then you could get away with just one. It was expected that you did all the work yourself with the guidance of your mentor. That you thought of the experiments and carried them out, with minimal assistance. I know expectations are completely different in other fields. I knew people in bioengineering who only published in non-peer-reviewed journals and somehow managed to graduate. I also know someone in Biostats/computer engineering who got 40 publications, including 5 first author Nature papers. But they worked in a setting with 50 other people, and only did a small part for each project. In the 5 1st-author Nature papers, this guy was co-1st author with 5-10 other people. I don't think he could actually tell you what all or even 1/2 of those papers were about.

 

[jissho]

Publish or Perish.

 

[delirium81]

I would presume the average MD/PhD student would have more publications then the average PhD student because many times they are put on more high impact areas.

I wouldn't assume this. I certainly haven't seen much evidence of MD/PhDs getting more papers than PhDs in practice at my institution. It's much more field and lab dependent than MD/PhD vs PhD dependent. I also haven't seen any evidence of PIs necessarily giving higher impact projects to MD/PhDs.

 

[K31]

I would presume the average MD/PhD student would have more publications then the average PhD student because many times they are put on more high impact areas.

This isn't what I've observed in general. It isn't as important for the next step in our career for us to prove ourselves in grad school as it is for a PhD-only student, and many of us have the philosophy that you should take on a relatively safe project, get a couple of solid pubs, and get the hell out of graduate school as soon as possible. You are going to be out if research for five years or so after your PhD for clinical training, so your grad school record doesn't matter as much as if you were going to be pursuing a postdoc.

 

[jissho]

I train alongside MD/PhD students. Within my department, I have not seen any evidence that they get more publications than PhD only students. Additionally, I have not seen any indication that MD/PhDs are placed more often in high impact areas. Of course none of this is data driven. I think it boils down to the field, talent, type of project, and a dash of luck.

There was one student in my department that started off as a MD transitioned to MD/PhD and finally dumped the MD to graduate as with a PhD. The productivity level of this person made the rest of the students in the department look like a joke.

 

[Poisson]

It does depend on so many factors, and if there is a correlation it would probably be small. Just at my particular institution, the places where you are more likely to see a PhD post MD or a joint MD/PhD student do research is in a department that publishes a lot, which coincidentally is high impact. Some of the most upcoming high impact areas though you may see only 5 pubs. We would have to do an in depth study to see if there is a correlation, but I don't think there is. Also just because someone has a lot of publications, doesn't mean they are a bad or good researcher, so we shouldn't assume that because someone is in low journals with 5 publications, that they are worse than someone with 2 nature publications. All of this is bad mentality. Scopus trumps impact factor IMO when you have billy bobs paper with a similar topic in podunk journal pop-up next to newton's paper in Science. In the case of my grandpa, having most of his work published as first or only author in Science, it was pretty clear there weren't any people doing similar things. However in many fields, you could have someone doing similar things, publish in lower journals, and be doing great work. I have seen trash graphs and correlations from Nature before that should have never been published. Also many top researchers publish brilliantly robust work in journals with a 0.5 impact factor, but hey they show up on Scopus, look clean, and publish fast, so why not?

 

[snobored18]

Alright I've been reading some of these responses and a few have been good for a laugh or two.

To the OP...disregard anything mentioning multiple "Nature" papers...your average, above average, even the bulk of "superstar" PhD and MD/PhD students will not leave with one let alone multiple first author papers in journals with a 30+ impact factor (e.g. NEJM, JAMA, Nature, Nature-daughters, Science). Does it happen...of course. But a solid PhD in the biomedical sciences is probably ~2-3 first-authored peer-reviewed manuscripts with a decent pertinent first author review.

Don't believe me...a number of MD/PhD programs list their current trainees (with PhD mentor) do an author search in PubMed for those trainees who have already defended (e.g. M3 and M4s) and you'll get a pretty accurate sense of the number of pubs they've accumulated. After reviewing a couple of MSTPs hopefully you can begin to formulate what the realistic publication expectations are for a given field.

 

[Rumit]

At my program, it was typically 1-3 first author publications for graduation. Almost nobody that I know of had more than that. The big differentiator was the quality of the journal they published in and how many additional papers they got their names on.