It does not work that way. You do not plan for numbers. You just make as many good papers as you can and aim them for publication in the best journals that will accept them. One paper will turn out to be brilliant, and everyone will call it the "Francis paper". Two will turn out to be good. Three will turn out to be mediocre. Two will be rejected outright. You will be so ashamed of the remaining two, that you never, never let them move off your hard drive.

Now, stop wondering and wander back to your Gastroenterology paper :-)

I will go for 2nd option.

I agree with Amir "I will go for the second option

Hi, do you really know "early-career researchers" (=Diploma-students/PhD-students) with 3 publications in high-impact journals or with 10 pubilcations in "normal" journals? Cheers, Nadine

It does not work that way. You do not plan for numbers. You just make as many good papers as you can and aim them for publication in the best journals that will accept them. One paper will turn out to be brilliant, and everyone will call it the "Francis paper". Two will turn out to be good. Three will turn out to be mediocre. Two will be rejected outright. You will be so ashamed of the remaining two, that you never, never let them move off your hard drive.

Now, stop wondering and wander back to your Gastroenterology paper :-)

I believe that is not the most important number of publications, but rather the quality of the journals that stay, that because normally a good researcher seeks to leverage its scientific output based on the level of impact it will generate and the number of citations of their work. Therefore, my appreciation is to try to put my work in journals with higher impact, and if the research is not accepted in, there will be another magazine that if accepted. That is why in most magazines there an editorial committee that reviews research and determines the quality of them, and in almost all, if assessments are made are not so consistent with the editorial guidelines or have errors in its formulation . With this you can also keep improving and enabling research in place increasingly important journals with greater impact.

It is important that the articles be peer reviewed as those carry more substance in the eyes of those who are looking at your work. So it is much more important to have 2 to 3 great publications rather than to just frivolously publish articles to make up numbers. If the numbers are great and the articles are substantial that is even better but substance and depth is more what they are looking for.

If you think an article is "average," my advice is to improve it until you think it is good (or better yet, excellent). Don't publish anything but high quality work, because whatever gets published will be speaking of you and your work for the rest of your days.

Some good response here. I'm most inclined to Ian's. At the end of the day - very few neophyte authors can aim for and automatically get their manuscripts accepted in high quality journals. If they do - they are usually as a lower author in a team article. The reality for many authors, and certainly my experience, is that you have to 'work your way up' - which probably means that you have to do the numbers-game in lesser journals - with plenty of rejections along the way; for good and bad reasons. That said, a two-pronged approach can be a good one. The majority of my early publications were in lesser quality journals - but I 'chanced my arm' and threw a few at higher quality journals. I wasn't initially successful - but the feedback from them assisted the crafting of future articles. Once i got the first one accepted in a higher quality journal - the 'glass ceiling affect' didn't apply any more and I regularly submitted to those journals with quite a measure of success.

Great discussion above...

just wanted to point out that there may be a catch in equating good publications and good research...

regards, raza

There's always that risk Raza - but as a number of previous threads have pointed out, hopefully, the 'system' sorts out the good from the bad - and good research shines through.

I agree Dean, we should all hope that good research prevails in the end...

am i being too naive to hope that one day the quality of research, and not the quality of the journal it is published in, will be the main metric followed by all researchers... :)

Absolutely loving the responses. Thanks all :)

Raza - tricky to say really. It's not naive to think that it is possible - but will most likely to continue for some time to boil down to driving commercial business models - and 'supply and demand'. Consumers may often want to be 'entertained' rather than informed.

Thanks for the discussion so far...

Well, you cannot tell if this paper you are working on will be accepted at the first place, then you will never know that this will be considered a great paper - you conduct research, analyse and write and then send for publication - and the work that you put for every paper is the same - those are like children to you ... you will not have the luxury of stating that those are good children and those are average children - they are all your children!

Thanks and regards

Theodora Issa

Relax on this pressure to publish. If you have a couple of papers you've enjoyed working on and you find that other researchers would benefit form it, don't refrain from submitting it.

Forcing papers out of your finger to achieve a large number of publications, whilst impressive on a resume, won't provide you with any feeling of accomplishment.

Like what you write, and show it to other people, be that colleagues or supervisors. They will let you know how to improve it and where to make the difference.

I believe that you had in mind (but did not mention) the prestige of the journals where you publish not the quality of the publications, because the quality is a sine qua non condition.

To understand this condition, imagine that you make it at a phase of a competition (could be for hire, for grants, etc) when selection committees start reading what you actually produced...

If what you indicated as output s not judged of "good quality", whatever that means, you will be disqualified. And it does not matter that you produced 10 or 2-3 articles, because the committee would not have physical time to read more than 1-3, in any case.

Of course, to make it at this stage, you have first to fulfill somehow some other conditions extrinsic to the quality of your publications (come from an institution which is recognized, had a supervisor who is acknowledge in the field, have good references, etc-it work in the way Randall Collins somehow describes in The Sociology of Philosophies, http://www.amazon.com/The-Sociology-Philosophies-Global-Intellectual/dp/0674001877), but if you fulfill these conditions and are in the stratosphere, then I think that 2-3 good pieces will be enough.

Being an early researcher (just four years in the profession), I really appreciate all the comments thus far even though I enjoyed Ian's and Dean's most. I nevertheless wish to state that the working environment determines the attitude of these specie of scholars towards the kind of research output they aim for. The concept of "publish or perish" backed by the continuous dwindling mentoring do not help many early researcher to differentiate between the good and average paper.

However, my take is that if one aims for the sky, he should aim higher. Truly as some have noted here, every paper is the same to a researcher but that I think will be when one puts in same effort into attempting to write good papers in the first instance. In the world of increasing technology and collaboration across borders, I think it is good to always attempt to submit papers that even one himself agrees to be good enough to give him chance of discussing the idea therein anywhere anytime. This we know after getting feed-backs from a number of colleagues.

My humble opinion is that how one fast transits from one phase of research life to another depends on how good his writings are and good papers are not rushed through the mills. It takes some time as we all know. Therefore while I don't emphasise the numbers, I think the patience in having few above average along the line will definitely pay off in making the today's junior researcher a very good scholar in the future.

Muhammad - a balanced post here. I agree with several points. I've had years where I produced around 10 or more publications. However, I've also had years with much less. If you are writing consistently - then there are times when your publications will 'bottle-neck'. For instance, I might have a few papers that I wrote a few years ago - but that have had to be re-submitted to different journals, several rounds of reviews and amendments and/or lengthy reviewing times. I would not recommend to anyone though to set themselves a target of say 10 per year. Writing then becomes a treadmill and it's easy to get fatigued and lose focus. There is also the temptation to write or submit anything to anywhere i.e. letters to editors in magazine-style journals etc - just to count it as a publication.

The other issue is that of 'subjectivity' ax well - around what an author sees as good quality and average quality (putting Impact Factors aside). Plenty of times - what I thought was a good quality article has not been received that way by reviewers and/or I look back at it a few years later and think 'that's not as good as I thought it was'. Some of my most highly cited articles have been ones that i thought were more average than good.

It is always appreciate by majority of the academicians that lesser no of papers in good impact factor journals are better than having a good numbers of publication in low rated journals for starting your career.

The idea that there should be either a "smart bomb" approach (a few excellent papers in excellent journals) or a "scatter gun" approach (a lot of average papers in average journals) is, of course, a false dichotomy; and, in a way, besides the point. One should not worry about this, aim to do the best one can, and just get one's work "out there" in the mix. Others will judge the worth of what you do. Un-read, unwritten research is not really research at all.

Perspective about one's research can only truly be made on a "whole-of-career" basis, and in historical terms. It also depends on changing "fads" in the discipline as to what is determined as "good" work. What was seen as "excellent" now might well not be later, and vice-versa (leaving aside cases of extraordinary genius/path-breaking work which few of us ever achieve).

Typically, most normal academics -- and by "normal" I mean people of average intellect and not geniuses -- will write a range of pieces of varying quality in their career; some will turn out to be more appreciated later on than they were when first published. Others will come to be seen as a less valuable than they were initially. Some, rare, people will only write one or two papers which will make their name forevermore (I am thinking of the infamous paper on the "Gettier counterexample" in the field of Philosophy. I think that short paper was the only one the the author published!)

In any case, writing for publication is an exercise is learning--learning to be an academic. One gets much better at writing, and more successful in placing one's pieces in journals, the more one writes. It is a formative activity. Setting out to write "three excellent papers in the world's top journals" is a silly way to approach one's academic work. Academics should not sit around agonising about quality. They should just write. It is what they are paid to do.

Good papers with solid evidence, a sound hypothesis or conclusion, well-though to do very effective in experiments needed and analyses. The accumulated impact of your papers (like H index) is more and more important now than the previous standard, the journal where they were published or the total number of them.

Problem is that you do not decide whether to publish 2-3 outstanding papers or 10 mediocre ones, others do. In addition you have some influence on paper quality (how and what you write) but the final, perceived quality is not a constant but a flux, depending on other factors like the gathered citations, changes in the standing of journal and the time elapsed after publication.

Publications should always be good - whether as a beginner or with heavy experience

No doubt for me. Publish 2 or 3 high impact factor and/or simply good (potentially highly cited papers) as a first author. That should really make the difference in your early scientific CV, despite there will be always assessment processes in that the higher the number of papers, the better....(i.e., no matter what you did, your contribution to the work (see ghost and multiple authorship problems), or either where you published your work).

Publications must be good and representable whether the researcher is new or experienced. Number depends on the working capacity of the researcher.