It's very hard to get 3+ top-tier pubs as a grad student by focusing solely on your own original research. It's much better from a pub standpoint to be good at getting in with multiple other groups, often through faculty connections. That said, you can then be left in the awkward position of having a diss/research agenda that's mostly disconnected from your pubs and with your hands in multiple honey jars that don't seem to connect. Some places won't mind that, others will prefer to see more coherency.
It's not the students' fault for doing this though, particularly given the obsessive drumbeat for publications and the need for people who aren't some kind of URM to have something concrete to hang their hats on to win over a committee. 5 good pubs vs. 0 pubs is much easier to justify than arguments over potential or research agenda coherency, though we'll see what happens this year.
Trying to parse this. I have a couple decent pubs with my adviser and then 3 mid-tier pubs that can straight from my diss.
Like...so... is it BAD to have 3 mid-tier pubs out of your dissertation now?
Is it actually better to be the worthless 4th author on an APSR?
Because if so... WOOF. ...Jim Fearon would be iffy to be a market star today based on how easy it was to get an IO back then...