>>11402809Publishing unimportant papers doesn’t really help your career. If you publish results in an unknown journal and they get 0 citations you might as well have not published at all. That’s the main reason why “number of papers” is a poor metric.
Additionally, it really depends on your field. Big collaborations in experimental particle physics or astronomy tend to communicate more through internal reports and memoranda than through frequent journal papers. Theorists and mathematicians, even grad students, will often publish incremental results several times a year, because the field can move quickly and getting scooped is a serious concern. A grad student working on smaller scale experiments in most fields will typically finish their thesis with one or two, maybe three first author papers as a result of 3-5 years of work. You should really defer to your advisor’s expectations and the standards of your field rather than some universal number.
It also depends on your goals. If you are hoping to go into industry your publication record generally doesn’t matter at all. If you are interested in working as a staff scientist or doing a postdoc, it is important, but it’s not the largest factor; your recommendations and connections within your field are way more important. Anyone making a hiring decision would always choose someone that they personally know is solid and that they get along with over a rando with some impressive publications.
Finally, from my own experience, I think most people publish inconsequential results too frequently. If you’re wondering if you should split up your work into publishing partial, unexciting data over several papers vs. making a really solid and compelling narrative that could make it into a major journal and will be highly cited, definitely go for the latter.
