Hi everyone,
I've heard varying advice regarding the 'right' or 'optimum' number of publications during a PhD (if possible!)
I haven't managed to get any journal articles published yet... but due to upcoming conference presentations I will have a paper in an e-book (with the publishing press of the organising committee..) and an abstract in another journal listing all the conference proceedings.

Just wondering what other people's experiences are of publications resulting from conferences, and are they viewed as a very junior version of a journal article, or fairly good?

Hope that makes sense...

Probably not the answer you want, but it depends. Which conference? Which Journal? In general a journal is better, but a paper at super hard to get into conference A is better than a paper in ridiculously low level journal B. At least in my field anyway. At my uni we are encouraged to publish, usually with the more preliminary stuff in a conference and with the full work in a good journal. I see it as - each publication is most of one chapter for my thesis. I intend to have either 3 or 4 publications by the time I finish (I have one and am writing up another and am 1.5 years in). Probably two conference and 2 journal if possible.

The paper I've written so far was a conference paper, but at a prestigious conference, and is viewed as fairly good. The one I'm writing is for a decent (but not the highest level) journal and would be viewed as slightly better. It is a continuation of the work from the conference, but much broader in scope and more detailed (with a lot of extra unpublished work added!).

Obviously this is just my experience doing an engineering PhD whilst working as an RA at a certain uni. Perhaps it's different elsewhere and in different fields?

How can we tell it's a prestigious conference/journal?