## Recommendations are a method for discrimination ##

The only reason why recommendations exist is to discriminate potential candidates - to have some information that is correlated with the candidate being better or worse. If everyone gets a good recommendation, or even recommendation as such, then the whole process would be useless, so everyone getting recommended is definitely not a reasonable goal. If an advisor sincerely believes that a candidate is weak, then the only ethical action is to give a clearly weak recommendation or no recommendation at all.

## What to do if you don't get good recommendations ##

1. Become better - identify your weak spots and fix them. It depends on the field, but 1 paper during PhD and 0 papers in a few years after that sounds like a strong indicator that the candidate isn't doing solid independent research and thus can't be recommended. This can be fixed in the obvious way by doing such research.

1. Communicate your good things - if you have done solid work, then it needs to be communicated and shown in order to be appreciated. If you've done anything useful and worthwile, then you should get that published. This, coincidentally, seems to be exactly what the advisor suggested.