Respectfully, I call bullshit. You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. There are a billion ways research can go right or wrong -- irrespective of your personal pedigree. Your ideas might be too early or late for your community to grasp, maybe you appeal to the wrong audience, maybe you're unaware of an application of your research, maybe you don't have the right set of collaborators or need a perspective that, often times, emerges out of a lucky encounters with someone. I respect your experience but I don't want it to give people the wrong idea about research success...
> Paper authorship had NO correlation with research success
I think paper authorship demonstrates that you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of work to persue a problem. That seems to be atleast one attractive skill in a PhD, wouldn't you agree?
> Paper authorship had NO correlation with research success
I think paper authorship demonstrates that you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of work to persue a problem. That seems to be atleast one attractive skill in a PhD, wouldn't you agree?