In many medical and health sciences institutes, one of the conditions for obtaining a doctoral degree is a certain number of papers published (aside from the thesis work, of course) as the first author. That's not entirely meaningless, because doing the research work is one thing, writing it up and getting it through the peer review process and published in a respected journal is part and parcel of the learning and training process. The draw-back to a prescribed number of papers is that authors tend to split up their findings into bite-sized nuggets that each yield a paper, instead of publishing the whole story in one.