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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.