<p>Many labs will produce multiple publications in a year, but it’s nearly impossible as an undergraduate to have your hand on enough disparate projects that are progressing fast enough to produce that kind of number of applications that you’ll have a significant enough hand in to be an author.</p>
<p>That’s just reality in a lab. If you want to do really great research and build your own project, starting your freshman year and sticking with it and working hard will maybe produce 2 publications. It takes time for results and things don’t go as planned and you don’t publish just because you’ve worked hard-- you actually have to find some interesting things rather definitively. You can work 80 hrs a week on a project for 3 years and get very little that’s publishable, maybe a short communication. You can work for one year and get three publications. It’s just not in your control.</p>
<p>If research is your goal you should be in a lab that has a higher undergraduate to graduate student ratio so that you’ll be taken seriously, be an essential part of the research, and have a mentor who is used to the unique supports an undergraduate researcher needs. Larger labs and larger schools will be more likely to put you on more menial work and not actually have you designing much and will have you reporting to graduate students or post-docs not working closely with a PI.</p>