Hi,

I'm planning on submitting my thesis later this year and starting to look at post doc opportunities. I can't help but notice that others in a range of disciplines have many publications at this point. I have 3 published papers that I'm a co-author on and 2 book chapters that I co-authored.

Bearing in mind that I'm in the social sciences, does this seem low, average or high to others? I'm concerned that it's low but my supervisor (who did his PhD in the 70's) doesn't feel that publications are a priority.

Thanks

GM

Grumpy, that's actually really, really good, even if its coauthored for coming out of a PhD.

I only have one publication in total. I'm a sole author to it though, (no coauthors yet but working on it) but landed a teaching/research role (and am currently drafting thesis chapters into journal articles).

3 publications and 2 book chapters, that's great! The only thing that brings you down is:

1) Whether those publications are in quality/high impact journals
2) Whether the book chapters are published through quality academic presses
3) If people you are competing against have a high number of sole-authored works.

Social science is a difficult discipline to publish in as sole authors (though also expected), while others like hard sciences, students have a multitude of opportunities to be listed as authors due to their involvement in the research. It can also be difficult if you are a qualitative researcher doing your own stuff.

Thanks alot awsoci! That's incredibly helpful. Although I have things like impact factors in the back of mind for when I publish my own first authored papers, I'd not considered checking the impact factors of the papers I'm co-author, this seems silly now :)

About the chapters, one is a prestigious publisher of practitioners materials and therefore should work in my favour in terms of applicability of research I guess. The other is a research methods chapter in a quality press so I'm feeling like both of these might hold a little more weight than I'd considered before.

Thanks a lot! Next stop - first authored papers from my PhD!

GM

GrumpyMule you're definitely ahead right now. Good work. I'm about to start my second year in Social Sciences, and I just convinced my supervisors to let me switch my PhD format from traditional submission to PhD by publication (Intro, 4 discrete but related articles, Discussion) and while not mandatory for the viva, I intend to get all 4 published by submission if it kills me.

Keep up the good work.

I think you're ahead, Grumpy. I'm so worried because I'm just about to submit and I currently have NO publications, so you're so ahead of me! It really concerns me because most of my peers have publications of some sort, but my supervisors don't seem to think it's so much of an issue, which frustrates me a bit. But it's got to the point now where I have to concentrate on finishing and then hopefully work really hard to get some publications after that.

You've done really well! Good luck with submission :)