Papers are useless to rate the quality of a PhD thesis - the jury, if chosen right, should be experts in this field and thus able to analyze by themselves whether the PhD was an original contribution to science ie finding a way of doing something that was never done before and believed to be impossible, or in reverse, proving something to be impossible, and therefore PhD worthy material.
The amount of papers doesn't matter - or should not matter, if the PhD is to have any sense. Meaningless papers are just a waste of trees.
For ex, in my PhD I identified a specific kind of variability in written sign language that for some reason hadn't be grasped by the linguists who worked on the same problem with us. The PhD was in computer science and there was a linguist in the jury- she had read the acts of the conference where I had presented a communication on this variability, and for her this contribution alone was worthy of a PhD.
In the end, since there were other interesting things, it was awarded summa cum laude, even if not a single paper was published on the subject in a journal - my work was only disseminated in presentations, acts of conference, and a research report ordered by the government.
That was in 2008. 4 years later, my work is leading to an actual implementation of the ideas discussed, for the reasons discussed in the manuscript, and I have my own page on the SignWriting website (SignWriting is the written form of sign language I worked on) : http://www.signwriting.org/library/history/contributors/Azna...
I feel damn proud to have been proven right not just by some research paper published in an obscure magazine, but by real people working on this same problem and bringing the issues in front of the Unicode committee (in progress - hopefully it will be completed in 2013 or 2014)
It's far from done yet - it is still research work. But after my work from 2008, I made a tiny dent in the universe (as in http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/the_illustrated_guide_to_...)
When it's complete, I'll be happy to write a paper presenting the difference between the theory and the actual implementation, which could prove useful to other people attacking similar problems.
But a paper is not an end by itself.
EDIT - adding some links
Intermediary work : http://www.irit.fr/-Publications-?code=2628&nom=Aznar%20...
Manuscript : http://www.irit.fr/~Patrice.Dalle/Publis/these_aznar.pdf