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[totoro]

I first heard this when I was an undergrad. I turned a couple of my undergrad papers into publications  - the first came out the semester I started my PhD - and one other undergrad paper I gave up on eventually after sending for review. A couple of papers from my masters degree eventually turned into publishable papers. By the time I got to the PhD my advisor said: "Everything I write is intended for publication, so should be everything you write".

[advil]

I don't mean to discourage, but it seems to me that profs say this to everyone and it rarely leads to a publication.

Well, if you're in a good grad program, the odds are that a lot of students are from time to time producing potentially publishable work.  Especially for qualifying papers -- it is somewhat problematic if they aren't, in fact.  So it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that many students hear this at one point, and I do think most professors who say this are indicating something about the work in particular, not the student. 

But on the other hand the road to publication is difficult, both practically and psychologically.  The main reason this kind of comment rarely leads to publication at this stage is because there's a lot of work, and typically also some major mental barriers, between "potentially publishable" and "publishable" for a young grad student.  Most people won't really act on this kind of comment, because (I think) of the mental barriers.  The professor doesn't mean by this "go submit it to Nature tomorrow".  Rather, "if you spend months revising, and then more months dealing with reviewer comments, it is very likely to be published in a decent specialist journal."  But this doesn't mean you shouldn't do it -- you have to start some time (the earlier, the better), and it might as well be with this paper.

[new_anth]

I don't have much publication experience (I'm still a grad student), but I found what's been alluded to above quite true. My second year of grad school, a prof told me a seminar paper of original research I'd done was publishable. What he meant was that the topic was interesting enough that people who were not being paid to (i.e., him) read it might want to read it. I revised it, presented it at a few conferences the following year, revised again, and submitted it to a publication about a year after I'd originally turned it in. I got an r&r four months later. I couldn't bring myself to read the comments closely for a full month (yikes!). I revised over the summer and in early August, I resubmitted. In mid-September I got an acceptance, like navelgazer, from an interdisciplinary journal (top tier). It was in print almost a year after that (i.e., two years from when I first turned it in to my prof).

I was flattered and pleased, but didn't realize how important it would be in two concrete ways:
1) I learned about the process of polishing research into an article, got to understand the really lengthy timeline that it takes to get things in print, learned to not flinch at anonymous reviewers. I think that, if comments like "you should publish this," are made to lots of students, the process seems daunting and unknown and that's why lots of these potentially publishable pieces are not published. I think having done it once has helped demystify the process and made it easier to try to submit other pieces.

2) It helps on the CV and in grant applications and makes you (me) seem like a scholar. In my social science field where we write for external funding to support field research, on my "anonymous reviews" for my grants, I've had several readers make mention of that first article as a sign of potential. This totally caught me off guard because I still feel a bit like an impostor in academia.

[amazona2]

I had a prof who said she wanted papers of publishable quality that semester. Well, I took the challenged, she liked it and it was published with no changes in a peer review journal. Never thought it could happened, but it did.

Take what other students say with a grain of salt. Some times it's just sour grapes.

[ptarmigan]

I had a prof who said she wanted papers of publishable quality that semester. Well, I took the challenged, she liked it and it was published with no changes in a peer review journal. Never thought it could happened, but it did.

Take what other students say with a grain of salt. Some times it's just sour grapes.

I guess you edit your papers better than your forum posts.