[Scriddie]

Many programs have explicit (and often ridiculously high - e.g. 3+ first-author papers for a PhD) publication requirements. On top of this, many evaluation committees for grants, tenure, etc. simply count papers as opposed to actually reading them, leading to distorted incentives.

[sephrenra]

My university (in Central Europe) also has extremely high requirements for a PhD, even students that have 5-6 first-author papers have to fight with their supervisors to let them graduate. Part of the problem is that supervisors are automatically co-authors and are incentivised to get as many papers as possible out of their students.

[jampekka]

3+ papers requirement is the norm in many/most fields in Finland at least. Leads to lots of papers, which is probably not a good thing.

[adamc]

When I was a postdoc, my office-mate referred to them as LPUs -- "least publishable units". Squeeze as many papers as possible out of each real idea or achievement.

It contributed a lot toward my fleeing academia.

[osigurdson]

I bet the real rationale behind this, at least for most, is so they can continue to work on whatever areas they are legitimately interested in pursuing at a pace that has a hope of uncovering some new knowledge.

Data Driven = False Proxy

[orochimaaru]

4-5 conference and 1-2 journal were the requirements for me in the US. Conference had to be decently competitive IEEE or ACM and good journals. Picking something random would have gotten me into trouble with my advisor and committee.

So yeah - paper mills exist. But it’s the job of your advisor to block you from going down that road.

Now if your advisor himself is on that path I’d say you should exit your PhD. There is nothing worthwhile to be done there.

[warner25]

How much of that was expected to be as the lead author? That's an impressive body of work either way. I think that most top-tier CS conference papers are the product of a couple years of work from inception to presentation.

[orochimaaru]

Journal paper had to be lead author. Lead author on 3 conference papers out of 6 published. That’s what I ended up with - 6 conference, 1 journal. I graduated before I got the second one published. I did ieee conference papers - so they’re the smaller size - 5-7 pages. The ACM ones are hard.

[warner25]

Thanks, it's interesting to hear about the range of expectations, and it definitely varies a lot by field. Putting together three 5-7 page papers seems doable (as opposed to, like, three 13-18 page IEEE Security and Privacy or USENIX Security papers). Then I imagine that extending one of those, or combining them, into a journal submission might be easier.

Although, again, it probably depends a lot on the field. Someone with a biology PhD told me that she wouldn't even list a conference paper on her CV, because only journal articles matter. In computer security, I think that even IEEE and ACM journals get the "scraps" that don't get accepted into conferences, or they get previously accepted conference papers that have been extended with 20-30% more material.

For the papers on which you weren't the lead author, were those incorporated into your dissertation or defense at all? I'm still unclear on how that's supposed to work. I'm the second author on a couple things that are related to my dissertation topic, but not part of my dissertation draft as of now (I just cite them where it's appropriate). I would at least mention them during my defense when giving an overview of my complete body of work, but maybe that's it. My own advisor actually did his dissertation on a topic that was unrelated to the three papers he got published during his time as a PhD student. Apparently, his advisor was satisfied with that output and proof that he could do research and publish, and let him spend his final year on a project for his dissertation that put him into a more marketable area.

[orochimaaru]

They were. Because although I wasn’t the one who came up with the core mathematics around those I was the one who solidified proofs, did the grunt work around the code and figured out interesting edge condition behavior.

I would say I was about a 45% contributor as in the core idea was my advisors by I still did a LOT of work on them.

[HKH2]

Can't they be curated?

[warner25]

Yeah, I get that people need papers. I just don't see how paying to have one's name added to a sham paper with a handful of other unrelated paying customers could possibly help to meet that requirement.

If I told my committee that I got another paper accepted, and it was one of these papers, and they so much as glanced at the title and co-authors, they'd be like, "wtf?" And my academic career would be irreparably ruined.

[ceejayoz]

That probably serves as an indicator that some programs aren't so much as glancing at the title and co-authors.