How many Pubs in Grad School?

[sirdevinb]

How many publications is considered a "good amount" for a graduate student before graduating from a doctoral program for I/O Psychology? I know applied folks need more applied experiences rather than pubs, but what is considered "competitive for the academic route?

 

Thank you!

[Val006]

I am in social work so my trajectory may not be the same as yours as I appreciate that psychology is quite competitive but I would be curious to hear the discrepancies within our disciplines.  My program suggested 4 or 5 in the whole doctoral program (its a four year program) however my adviser and I think this is far from being competitive and I am aiming for 4 a year so hopefully will come out with around 16... so far I am on target.  How does this compare with your experience?

[quietq]

I can't suggest an exact number to aim for, but you could look at the CVs of recent hires in your field to estimate.

[bhr]

I would also try to differentiate between high and low quality publications. Things like proceedings papers, graduate journals, 4th or 5th author slots all count as publications, but won't count as much as getting a single first-authored paper in a major journal.

I was told to aim for one high quality and one low quality pub a year, but it's very field specific.

[fuzzylogician]

This is incredibly field specific. In mine, it's usually said that having one paper *accepted* to a major journal is what you should aim for (it can take them up to 2-3 more years to actually appear in print). If you have two, you are doing very well. A lot of students graduate without this one publication and end up publishing a couple of papers in their first postdoc/job. This doesn't count other measures of productivity, like presenting at conferences and writing conference proceedings. So, yeah, I don't think there is a lot of comparison to be drawn between that and fields where you can even talk about having 16 publications by the time you graduate without sounding completely insane.