Very good question, but I think the number of publication counts if you publish in a high quality journal.

I heard from my supervisor about other criteria such as :

- is your research has generated any results/products which is used by an industry.

Some interesting info regarding to the definition of research:

http://www.slideshare.net/AnkitBist/characteristics-and-criteria-of-good-research

thanks Nona Kermani. Defintely true only those papers in good and quality journals are counted but nowadays some of them are not using this criteria anymore. As long as you publish you paper elsewhere wether in proceeding or journals and wether it is quality or not they still count it....

Quality of their publications but not the number and how many times it's cited. If the publication is novel and solves some problem or helps to contribute to solving some problem then it's good. I think the journal it's published in is more elitish as that doesn't really tell you much about the quality of a publication at least in my opinion. Some journals are more exclusive than others but there are also politics behind that so I judge for myself.

Not necessarily, but you can judge the quality of their work, not their quantity

Dear Dr. Nazri Mohd Nawi,

It is not true that good researchers in their field are considered good by the numbers of their publications. The thumb rule is quality and the field of research.that amount for a good researcher.

It is not true.  Advances in science is not a function of number of publications.

Thanks for all the answers....actually I am still believe that the number of publications does not represent how good the researcher are. The most important thing is the quality of the paper that been produced.

Well, the problem is that when researchers know that they are appreciated by the number of publications, then they focus more in that criteria than in doing really significant contributions, and they repeat publications with only a formal difference. That can happens with any other criteria, like the number of citations, in which an interesting social phenomenon occur. So the best criteria have to be ahead of the researchers themselves. When too many things are decided based on fixed criteria, some form of crisis (and distortion) is likely.

I think you have raised two very important but different questions. The first is should we (gov'ts, tenure boards, etc) be trying to measuring how good researchers are and for what purposes. For example, the UK REF (http://www.ref.ac.uk/, this is a source worth consulting to learn more about one approach to measuring quality) is one of the bigger exercises in measuring research quality, and it is done part for prestige and part for money (and of course the prestige part turns into money too). With the move in many areas towards greater accountability and the difficulty in attracting the small amount of research funds (and jobs), it is likely there will continue to be needs to differentiate research quality.

The second question is how to measure it. Simply saying "quality" is more important than "quantity" is not useful without defining quality and how to measure it (and some of these may relate to quantity). There are lots of metrics from the h-index to so-called alt-metrics, and there always examples of great well-respected researchers who score low on one of these and less great researchers who score high on some of these (e.g., my ResearchGate score is high because I answer a bunch of questions like this and RG seems to think this is as valuable as a scholarly article!). So most attempts to measure quality use multiple metrics. The UK REF also had subject matter experts read individual pieces of research. They argue this is necessary. It is particularly important for newer researchers whose citation counts tend to look small (or are dominated by citations of the lab they were in as a PhD candidate).

Great:

Good publications, high-quality papers in high ranking journals indicate that the authors of these publications are considered, good researchers.