Dealing with an advisor who is not interested in publishing My advisor is a full professor nearing retirement age. Although he does not seem to be planning to retire anytime soon; he has this "been there/done that" attitude toward publications. He says that he has published enough significant work to be happy and that he only wants to publish breakthrough papers from now on. My issue is that I need publications to build a good resume. As of now, I have no publications from my PhD research.

My research project is structured in a way that any other professor would see it as an opportunity to get multiple publications out of it because each stage of the project has enough significance to be published separately. My adviser however wants only one comprehensive paper. I have several issues with this:


This reduces the number of publications appearing on my resume. I know that this really shouldn't be important, because I would still be publishing the same content. However, this is important when applying for competitive R&amp;D positions in tech (the types of jobs I'm interested in) where during the first stages of screening applicants the number of publications would matter (since no one will actually read them at that point).
This also means that I will not be able to submit anything until close to my graduation which would mean that unless I delay my graduation until after the review process is over, I would have no publications when I graduate. Several people in industry who would be hiring for the types of jobs I'm interested in have told me that they do not consider PhD applicants who have no publications.


How would you propose I handle this situation? Today I told him that I'd like to submit an abstract to a conference but he would not permit it, saying that he is afraid that someone at the conference will steal our idea and publish it in a journal before we are able to. I really think he was just using that as an excuse though.
In comments, you say that you have less than a year left until graduation.  Given this fact, it would likely not be easy to get more than a couple of quality publications out during this time in any case, particularly with a perfectionist advisor and little experience in publishing yourself.

As such, I think your big goal (besides graduating) should be to get a good postdoc lined up, where you can solidly advance your career and do a lot of publication.  Having few publications but a respected advisor can be a totally reasonable combination for moving to a good postdoc.  If necessary, you may even do more than one round of postdoc.  Once you establish a solid "upward trajectory" and track record of publications, the fact that you published little in grad school will not be a problem, particularly if your one grad school publication is indeed a very good one.