I know its different for different disciplines, but I just wondered how many papers people had and when they got them in terms of their postgrad careers.

Social Political Sciences, first got published one year after finising MPhil. it was a paper from my MPHil dissertation. Oh, and a year before that I wrote a book review:) A minor, but still publication. :)

I've got one journal article and various conference papers after a year of PhD-dom.

Medical sciences: Just started my PhD and have a paper that's just gone off to be published, data was from my undergraduate research project.

Eek! Published already!

I'm 4 months in and have only got a conference paper. Argh!

Depending on the area in where you are working, in biological science, getting published the first article with your own data might probably take 1.5 years or more. I am still away.

I haven't started yet, although I found out two days ago that a conference abstract is being done in September with my data, which is good.

Matthew: you haven't even started? That's outrageous. You'tre making the rest of us look bad!

Haha. Well after my degree I did 9 months as a research technician. Now I'm just hoping I can get a PhD to start in September.

I published a translation (I mean, an academic translation, with preliminary study, notes, etc.) in my 2nd year as an undergrad. However, this is not really relevant now because my PhD (and hopefully future academic jobs!) is in a different field.

A short article of mine will be published this month, however it is in a minor, interdisciplinary publication, so I guess it doesn't count that much. The same can be said about conferences - I just gave a paper in one but it was a very small one.

I have submitted/ am about to submit some material for more serious journals/conferences, but it's just to see what happens, I'm still in my first year and my true goal is getting published/heard during my second year which I think is more realistic.

In science and my first article was a review of my field and it was published 1 year into my PhD. My second paper was results from my PhD and was published 3 years in (I was very slack at writing that paper - should have been done about 18 months in!). Now that my PhD is almost over, I have 2 or 3 more papers I will write after I submit my thesis, all of which are results from my work. I also got one conference paper.

wow, Piglet. How do you manage to a life as well (timewise)?

I had a life too.

In fact, I have always felt a bit of a slacker in regards to the results I have generated and the papers I have published. Some people have the burning ambition to publish, and although it felt good when I did, I am not that driven to publish more. My supervisor just nags a lot and I feel an obligation to publish for the sucess of our lab.

Friend of mine also in science published 9 papers during her PhD and presented at about 5 international conferences, plus was invited to Japan and Denmark to teach other researchers about the techniques she had developed. Now that puts my achievements in perspective.

I think you achieved quite a lot already.
I've known one guy, now senior lecturer at Ashridge, published 5 top journals during his PhD. However, as a result his PhD took 8 instead of 4 years till completion.

I think success as a PhD student should ideally be the PhD itself and not publications. A PhD is supposed to prepare for a research career, yes, but it doesn't mean that a PhD student has to be a successful researcher and publishing tons of articles during the PhD. Some people also decide to move out of academia after PhD and as we all know, in the real world publications count almost nothing.

On the one hand, I agree with you ULUG. The main aim of a PhD student must be to finish his/her PhD in time and in a very good quality, publications will follow naturally from a PhD afterwards. On the other hand, you cannot get a proper job in a good university if you have no publications. That means, you have to get one of very limited postdoc places (with its relatively crapy 'salary') and then write publications. So, maybe it is a good idea to have at least one publication while doing PhD. But of course, it varies from field to field.