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I'm tempted to say quantity. People, even very smart ones, seem to have a bias for thinking higher numbers are always better. That's even the way it often works in tenure decisions. If you have 20 articles, few will object, but if you have 3 of high quality articles probably nobody will think you deserve a spot on the permanent faculty. This may be partly due to the fact that few in the department will know your research. So maybe the best way to get into these top programs is to combine high quantity with pretty good quality.
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<p>Actually, I would have to disagree. It's really about quality (or at least how quality is perceived). Obviously quantity matters too, and the ideal is to have a high number of quality papers.</p>
<p>But when push comes to shove, quality trumps quantity. You are correct in saying that, for the purposes of tenure review, most people, even in your own department, will not know your work, and many of them will have never read your publications. However, as a compensating mechanism, departments will then send out evaluation letters to your "peers" all around the world to have you ranked against other profs in the world who do the same work that you do. Now, granted, the selection of these "peers" is an interesting topic all in itself, but the point is, these peers are supposed to know your work deeply and hence have the expertise to judge you. Usually these peers are the people who go to the same conferences that you attend, serve on the same journal editorial boards that you serve on, and are generally looking at the same sorts of research questions that you are looking at. If these outside peer letters come back negative, your chances of winning tenure will be badly hurt. </p>
<p>The other way that article quality is judged is via citation. Now, granted, citation numbers are no perfect proxy for quality. But they do serve as an indication at least of 'importance' (whether good or bad). The vast majority of papers are barely cited at all. So if one paper generates hundreds of citations, you know that that article is important. You can then read some of the later work that does cite that paper to ascertain whether that importance is because the paper found something of great value, or whether that paper has been heavily cited because it has been widely discredited (and you can get a gist of which is the case after reading 20-30 such papers). In fact, numerous tools exist to be able to track and rank articles by citation, because academia considers citations to be such an important indicator of importance. {Heck, the original Google search algorithm was developed out of a Stanford research project designed to improve academic journal citation tracking.} </p>
<p>Yet another method of ascertaining quality is to look at the prestige of the journals in which they appear. All academic disciplines have a hierarchy of prestige regarding their journals - a few of them are considered to be the most prestigious, and then a bunch that are middle-of-the-road, and then a lot that are mediocre or worse. The more prestigious the journal, the harder it is to have your paper published in it. There are also some more general journals that are not only supremely prestigious but also stretch across multiple disciplines. The journals Science, Nature and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) fall into this category: as many scholars in the natural sciences consider these journals to be even more prestigious than the journals devoted to their specific discipline (because you're not only competing to publish against the scholars in your own discipline, but other disciplines as well). I would surmise that one article in Science, Nature, or PNAS is probably "worth" 5 or 6 articles published in an average journal in terms of tenure review or job placement. {But of course citation plays a role too - a heavily cited and praised paper in a no-name journal is worth more than a paper in *Science *that people never cite or cite only to debunk.} </p>
<p>In fact, having publications in mediocre journals can actually hurt you, such that there is a point at which it may be better to not have any publications at all rather than have some in mediocre journals. It all has to do with the revealing of asymmetric information as explained in the following blog:</p>
<p>*"...they have what's commonly referred to as "option value." Research schools (that generally pay higher salaries than teaching-oriented schools) want candidates that will publish in high-quality journals. A new graduate (particularly from a top school) is probably more likely to publish in top journal than is another candidate who's been out for a few years and has already published a few times in lower-tier journals. The reasoning is that the "seasoned" candidate has revealed his type - his publishing in lower-tier journals signals that the'll likely be a consistent publisher, but not at the journals that the better schools want." *</p>
<p><a href="http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html%5B/url%5D">http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html</a></p>
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Am a grad student(MS) in Auburn EE dept. I just want to know, how important is having published papers, in order to get admission from top schools for a PhD?
Is it the number that matters or quality? If I have 2 conference publications by end of MS, how much will it help me in getting into the top 10 schools for a PhD?</p>
<p>What if, I dont have ne thing published, in spite of doing good research?
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<p>Certainly, publication helps you get into grad school (as long your publications don't get debunked). However, plenty of incoming grad students at the top programs don't have a thing published. Heck, some newly hired assistant profs don't yet have any publications to their name at the time of their hiring.</p>
<p>As a case in point, consider Jeff Hannon, assistant professor of construction at the University of Southern Mississippi. He was hired as an assistant prof in 2003. Yet he didn't publish anything until 2004.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jeff.hannon.com/pers/John%20Jeffrey%20Hannon_CV07_External.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.jeff.hannon.com/pers/John%20Jeffrey%20Hannon_CV07_External.pdf</a></p>