How do some PhD students get 10+ papers? Is that what I need for landing good faculty position?

I think at least part of the answer lies in different cultures across fields. I did my PhD in computer science/artificial intelligence. There a huge focus is on conference papers which tend to be smaller contributions. Often incremental progress on a single project is reported in multiple conference papers and it was expected that a paper corresponds to several months worth of work. Frequently you would publish in a conference and then have an extended version appear in a journal. All in all, 5 first-author papers upon PhD was not exceptional. Also we had a lot of within-group collaboration so I got to e.g. run a few statistical routines on someone else's data, help write the manuscript and become a coauthor for about a week of work. I ended my PhD with 23 publications, 8 of which were first-author - this was above average in my group, but not exceptional.

Now I do bioinformatics and collaborate a lot with biologists. Their papers are usually longer and for any result you need a lot of tedious manual work in the lab. In turn, the papers represent years worth of work. Many people - even brilliant ones - end their PhD with 1-3 first-author publications. I've heard in some areas, publications are even harder to come by. In other words, the number of publications is not a very good proxy for brilliance, especially when you are ignoring quality and comparing across fields.

As for the 100+ citations - my best bet (since you mention bioinformatics) is that this is because the students co-authored some software/tool/protocol that ended up being useful => cited. (tool papers tend to be the most cited ones). This is obviously a success, but once again does not necessarily imply that failing to produce useful tools is a sign of non-brilliance.

Example: DeSeq2 software for comparing gene expression across samples has > 10 000 citations on Google scholar while the first detection of gravitational waves has just above 6 000 citations on Google Scholar.

Also me and some of my colleagus have landed reasonable jobs with roughly 0 citations (excluding self).


First, that's not a useful question to ask, primarily because it's nothing you can control in any reasonable way.

Second, just because some graduate students have somehow come up with such statistics does not imply that your average competitor has. It's a bit similar to the average physicist not having published three papers at the age of 27 all of which could have gotten a Nobel Prize on their own -- even though Einstein did. You will always have people who are far better than everyone else, and they will likely get positions somewhere, but they're not going to fill all available positions.

Finally, publications are just one measure search committees use to determine who to hire. There are many questions on this forum that discuss the many many other criteria used, so I won't repeat them, but you might want to read through these other posts to see that publications are really just one of many criteria.


As someone who got 6 publications during their PhD - it's often because they are of low quality. I (wrongly) placed a large focus on quantity over quality and it resulted in a rather lacklustre thesis.

Some people are able to get large numbers of high-quality publications, but they are so much more rare than people who get large numbers of papers that will never be cited or even read by anyone of note.

It's good to have some publications - but it's better to ensure that the research you are doing is of value to the field!