This whole thing about how many pubs counts as too many is the type of firestorm I'd normally avoid. However, this is Twitter, so allow me, someone without a professor job who has never been on a hiring committee, to rampantly speculate with a few thoughts. BUCKLE UP (1/n)

I've been playing a fun game for years where I ask professors how many pubs you need to get a tenure track gig at their university. With maybe one exception, all of them have said that they don't count pubs. They really do just assess quality. (2/n)

They also typically have at least one anecdote of a time they had a candidate with 40+ papers out of a post-doc that they did not hire. To me, this suggests a few possibilities: 1) all of us ECRs freaking out about having enough papers are wrong. (3/n)

2) Everyone I've asked (admittedly not a representative sample, but it's gotten decently big over the years), is lying to me. They actually do count pubs, but they don't want to seem like they value quantity over quality. (4/n)

3) They are trying not to count pubs, but the number still influences their decision in a pretty reliable way. Now, I know what you're thinking: researchers making biased decisions without realizing it? This is totally where I'm going to come down on this. But wait! (5/n)

If I had to bet, I'd say the link here is that 4) folks on hiring committees really do prioritize quality. It's just hard to predict which projects, at the outset, will have the highest quality and impact. The more papers you have, the better your chances of having a hit (6/n)

This might explain why folks who get jobs have so many papers (and why # of pubs at first job seems to be increasing). It's not that the total number gives them an edge, it's that they've tried enough things that a few of them look good to enough hiring committees (7/n)

I'd make the prediction that a lot of these candidates could have not done several projects that produced pubs on their CV and still gotten the jobs that they did. If they could predict which projects wouldn't later help them get a job, they might not have done them (8/n)

The problem is that it's hard to predict which things are going to matter most in your research portfolio. Given that uncertainty, giving yourself more chances to have a hit increases your chances of having one (or a few). (9/n)

This isn't to say that those other (non-hit) projects are worthless. Making contributions to science and the literature is good. It just seems like some studies and papers count for more than others on the job market, and less impactful papers might not make the difference (10/n)

So overall, I'd guess that it's not that having more papers is, in itself, good. It's that having more papers is likely related to having the few papers you'll need to get a job. Either that or I'm totally wrong about all of these dynamics (which is very possible, /end)