Odds of a Career in Science in Academia

[Pythagorean]

Counting the last year of grad school, this is a paper every 4 months. That's not crazy. To ensure these papers are not just fluff, they want to see that they are cited, and are looking for about 1000 cites -- 50 per paper on average.

??

That's not crazy? I can't imagine writing good quality publications once every four months without a team of graduate students. To do the experimental research can take a year sometimes!

 

[AccAcc]

How are you counting papers? Lead author-only, or just being included on papers by groups of what size? Three lead-author / year sounds completely insane.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm counting total papers, but that's not as huge a number as people seem to think. This is not an easy job - you're always scrambling to put papers together, grant proposals together, referee reports together, lectures together...

 

[ModusPwnd]

Sounds like what the post-doc in my lab did, 4+ a year. Not all as first author. He did have a group of students under him, but he also worked his *** off. We were an experimental group that was able to put out papers faster than most groups though, due to the nature of our research.

 

[Corpuscule]

I know many students who publish 5+ papers a year in prestigious journals (from Phys Rev to Nature), never mind postdocs (who often publish 10+ or even 15+ a year).

50 citations per paper is a much harder part, and seems to be mostly luck based. I actually don't know any scientists (either postdocs or professors) who have 50 citations per paper on average.

But then it all may be different in different subfields. Maybe in some areas it takes longer to prepare a paper, but you are more likely to get more citations...