if shooting for publication, what timeline is required for it to be considered?

[spectastic]

I'll be a 2nd year applying for fellowships. I know I will probably need a publication (1st author) by this time in order to be distinguished from the pool. I already have a couple of project ideas that I've been trying out. Still need to work out the bugs, but I think they can become papers if I optimize my experiments. I'm also told that manuscripts don't mean anything, and that publications is what will be considered for these things. So for things like NSF, NDSEG, when do I need to have a publication in order for it to be considered with my application? So for NSF, I would imagine that it would have to be not long after December, maybe a week or two into January? anyone have an idea?