Professor wants to submit paper, but no real results I am an undergraduate student who is working on some research projects applying machine learning to medical problems at a small, primarily-undergraduate college.

In one of these projects, a Master’s student suggested a feature extraction approach and wrote some code based on it. Unfortunately,  I couldn't reproduce the results. I tried to talk to him about it, but we couldn’t reach an agreement. I showed the professor leading the project that the results were not trustworthy, but she wants me to write a paper based on the method, where the other student and I would be listed jointly as first author.

In the meantime, I do not have any alternative results in hand. The problem we are working on is very difficult and has never been attempted before, and I am still developing the codebase for my own approach.

This conversation has been going on for a while, and my professor is getting impatient and wants to publish quickly. She says that some people within the department are pushing for her resignation (for reasons not pertinent to this question), and I think that may be the reason.

I am unsure of how to handle this situation because


I do not want to get the professor in deeper trouble
I want to remain a good member of our team
I want to do good work


I do not really have anyone who I can go to for advice without getting this professor in trouble, and I have no idea how to navigate this situation.

Why I couldn’t reproduce the results:

The model only performed well when trained and tested on all data, but under those circumstances, almost any model could, and many silly ideas can even outperform it. The technique didn’t really make sense within the domain, either, and I am not sure the student understands what it does.

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I have looked online for similar situations, like these ones, but I am still not sure what to do.

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You have two options. First option: decline to be the author of the paper, second option: write and submit the paper as first author. In the second case, the paper will go under review and the reviewers and the editors will decide if it is a good publishable result. Personally I would choose the second option in a high-medium ranking journal. In this way, if the paper will be rejected, it will not be your fault and you will not enter in contrast with your professor.