How many papers are people expected to publish a year?

>biology
>undergraduate
if you're a rockstar and you're lucky you'll get one first author paper. those people are rare. count yourself lucky if you get a minor authorship of the "you walked in the room once" level
>graduate
somewhere around 2-3 first author papers, maybe 1-2 if you're in a tough field
>postdoc
at least one a year

none of that counts second/third author spots on other peoples' papers

i saw a thesis with 420 citations.. it was nothing but copy paste all over the place with no structure defined, and suddenly the results, it was 500 pages long, nobody bothered to read it and somehow it won a prize

>He's got 30 papers in 7 years already.
>7 years already.
>7 years

Most students take 5. Why 7? Sounds like a slave with 30 publications.

I am talking about how much you get cited, not how much you cite.

He's on his last year of an MD-PhD. Maybe he was a slave, but he walks out with enough credentials to probably get a residency/postdoc anywhere he wants.

People can take longer for legit reasons: switching advisors partway through, solving a 2-body problem, financial security from a multi-year fellowship, only applying to prestigious postdoc programs, etc.

It depends entirely on the field.

>Theory papers are super easy to crank out

Lolwut? Wouldn't it be hard as shit?

>find some minor unsolved problem in the theory that's not that important and is slightly enough of a pain in the butt that nobody's done it yet
>spend a month or two solving it
>get a paper

Listen OP there's two approaches.

You have the Indian who's publishing 50 papers on yet more fucking VLE data per year.

Then you have the MIT researcher who publishes 0.5-3 GOOD papers per year.

In the end how can you quanitfy who is the better researcher?

H-index. Yeah, whatever your own opinion is that's all people seem to care about anyway.

As an aside did that PhD guy get 10 co-authorships (which some groups "cheat" on) or all first authorships? That's a lot of papers for a grad-student most get an average of around 1 per year.

>these aren't just hoops to jump through, they're supposed to be contributions to the field

More like contributions to the length of someone's science penis.

Their system is retarded I can't really blame them.

Citations aren't everything, there's plenty of inbred academic groups that keep citing each other over the same retarded topic they keep squeezing out.

>If you are Chinese then you co-author EVERY paper written by your department... 10 papers per week!

this is seriously ridiculous, there's a Chinese group in my department who puts on 10 names per paper, and then I find out some of them have like one first author paper and like 7 nth author papers...

>How many papers are people expected to publish a year?

About tree fiddy

Trust trust me trust me rust I'm here wa wa wa wa

That is really dumb m8.

you better git gud fag

>He still got a faculty job.

remember yall the secret to doing well in any job is a 20/80 split. 20% is acutally being able to do the job & 80% is being liked

be likeable

god forbid you work together and have ethnic pride to band together

political correctness has destroyed us

The theory doesn't have to be some big revolutionary idea like inflation or general relativity. For example when the possibility of Planet IX was announced earlier this year, several theory papers came out shortly after showing how one could produce something of that mass and orbit.

>Seriously, these aren't just hoops to jump through, they're supposed to be contributions to the field.
This is the real world, kid. Publish or perish.

Topkek

Publishing something in mathematics which hasn't already been done is incredibly hard.

The vast majority of papers published are essential repeats of what has already been done, and the person wants to claim that they discovered it.

>Lolwut? Wouldn't it be hard as shit?
That's what I heard

Second this post. I'm in biomedical research, I'd say this applies to biochemistry/biophysics, molecular/cellular biology, etc.

> How many papers should a undergraduate engineering student try to publish before graduating?

Most won't publish any. Depends on the PI, projects, funding, etc. I spent almost three years with one PI and I didn't get any. I spent about 6 months in a department in the school of medicine just doing some basic work and got a name on a paper. I had an opportunity for a first author in JACS but I was a fucking retard and quit the group cause drama, my own fault.

> How many papers should a masters student in engineering try to publish before graduating?

If you're doing a masters in Engineering you probably are just getting a professional masters, so it will probably be a capstone project, not research.

> How many papers should a PhD in engineering try to publish before graduating?

Depends what you want to do. If industry then it doesn't matter that much. For academia, I would say try to get one first author paper per year.

There are some crazy PI's though, I saw a professor at UC Berk that had like 22 papers during his PhD, 11 of which were first authors.

It's pretty much impossible to first author a paper every 2 months and have it be high quality, unless you're Erdos or some shit, or you have a team of people helping you, which is unlikely as a PhD student.

PhD students should aim at one high quality paper a year at least, but even then it depends highly on the field. In math, the review process is hellish, and the bar for publishing a bit higher, so 2-3 good papers would already make you a superstar. In experimental sciences, you're more likely to have all your publications at the very end of your degree. You also have to hope your experiments turn out okay and interesting. There is definitely a luck component to it.

I need your advice, my good user.
I am going to get my second bachelor in bioinformatics next two year. I am looking mostly for coding in R. Right now I volunteer for some nice guy w/ metabolomics and NMR and going to stay there. I asked him already but need to hear other opinion. I am thinking to stick to academia.

amidoitright?

What is your first degree in. At my school a MA in bioinformatics / biostats is paid for by the school with a teaching stipend of 20k or research stipend of 25k. The only requirements are Calculus I - III and a course in statistics.

Depends, of course. In the UK, a PhD is only about 3-3.5 years, and papers aren't mandatory. Publishing ONE is sort-of a must, but I've seen plenty not publishing at all.

If you're working on the development of a method that takes you two years, you're not going to publish one per year.

As far as the PhD goes, publish one good paper, instead of 3 shitty ones.

You can still ask your advisor as an alumni.

Obviously there is no "doing it right" formula. It really depends on what interests you and what you want to do.
If you do want to stay in academia, where you do your M.Sc. doesn't matter much (you could even do direct to PhD), but you should carefully choose your PhD adviser. I recommend reading this paper which really helped me at the time:
ac.els-cdn.com/S0896627313009070/1-s2.0-S0896627313009070-main.pdf?_tid=75233dac-2ff7-11e6-ae78-00000aacb362&acdnat=1465665235_d2427980eeee90e18328b891a554bb9c

Also, if you do choose to stay at your lab regardless of your eventual adviser, I am sure it will look nice on your CV, but I am fairly surprised about the "volunteering" part. At least in my country, most bioinformatics labs are always looking to pay some students minimum wage to be codemonkeys and do the boring work, especially if you can write in R. I don't know where you are from or what your lab's financial status is, but you may want to ask about getting fucking paid.

Also a practical advice, R is a very important language in bioinfromatics, and I personally find myself using it for every project. But often, especially when you're part of a big project, most of the code won't be in R. I hope you already are, but if not I recommend you get proficient in at least a basic language like python or pearl which are widely used (also shell script obviously).