^True, but here’s the thing, theres a lot that goes into a publication that is completely beyond the student’s control, and graduate schools know this (at least, MD/PhD programs certainly do). Many graduate programs do not even require publication for awarding a PhD. It’s a topic of debate as to whether it should be a strict requirement for the following reasons:
- What is the person gets scooped? If you spend your entire PhD working on something popular, there is a chance that someone will beat you to the punch. This makes your work unpublishable. Does it invalidate the work that you did though? Do we want to discourage students from pursuing popular topics for fear of being scooped?
- What if a lab is prominent enough that the PI will only publish in Nature/Cell/Science? It’s quite possible to do a fantastic amount of work that could easily get published in a fantastic journal that isn’t one of the big 3. Do we want to discourage students from pursuing those professors because their excellent work may not get published until years later?
- Non-scientific hurdles. This one I can easily speak on from personal experience. I did data analysis on data from a clinical trial (drug had failed, was using answers from the questionnaires they had to fill out for other stuff). My PI was ready to submit not 1, but 2 papers from the work I had done in a single summer. He was extremely impressed with my work, and so one paper I would be 2nd author and the other I would be first author. The clinical trial, sponsored by the VA, got held up because of a senate inquiry into the trial itself. My data, being based on the clinical trial, could not be published until after the main trial had been published. The papers were not published until 5 and 5.5 years after I left, and my name was bumped down the authorship list to 4th and 3rd (with honestly, not enough new work done in my opinion to justify putting residents currently active in the guy’s group at the time ahead of me, the graduate student at another institution who was in his lab 4.5+ years prior)
While this is more in regards to graduate students and hard requirements for PhDs, they still apply to the value of an undergraduate with a paper under their belt.
There are troves and troves of graduate students (and yes, even at the top programs) with no publications under their belts. They had extensive experience and thus could talk in depth about their research as well as good LORs from respected PIs. Those are more important than whether your name can be found on pubmed.
Also, keep in mind, I’m talking about undergraduate research performance relative to graduate student research performance. My whole purpose for making that statement is in regards to the question of the importance of publishing on undergraduate education. A fantastic undergraduate student might contribute to 1 or 2 papers during their 4 years. A PhD student, in that same 4 years, could easily contribute to 3-11 papers (speaking from people I know). Which one would you rather have for 4 years? Unless you value it (which you should, and too much publication weighting would devalue it) it’s simply too detrimental to your productivity to train an undergraduate vs. a graduate student or post-doc.
Additionally, when it comes to middle authorship, people often get very loose with the ethical guidelines as to what constitutes authorship. A ranking that awarded points for undergraduates getting middle authorship would almost certainly make this worse.
Any scientist will tell you about the flaws in the current peer review system, and even worse flaws exist in publication/scientific power ranking systems (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/787.full?rss=1#pageid-content). I’m not convinced necessarily that there’s a better system out there, but the system in place is certainly not perfect, and I would be wary about the effects of undergraduate education if publications received too much weight. Notice my italics. I’m not saying publications are a meaningless metric, only that we should be wary of their drawbacks as we toss them out as a potential metric of undergraduate academia.