Is it common for PhD programs to require students to have a minimum number of papers to be eligible for the defense? In some countries like mine (Iran), you are asked to have at least two papers printed or accepted in an ISI journal before you can claim for your PhD thesis defense.


Is it like that in other countries?
Is there any world record for the number of papers extracted from a single PhD thesis?
Publishing papers is not a requirement in many places, but it usually depends on the specific university and graduate program. In the U.S. these things tend to vary from school to school. Sometimes research projects funded by industry prohibit the people involved from directly publishing results.

As for a world record, I'm pretty sure nobody keeps track of that. It is pretty subjective. How would you determine whether or not the paper is from your thesis rather than just being in the same field? There shouldn't be that much value in the number of papers either.