Professor is planning on delaying our paper I'm working on the project of a professor in my school, expecting its results to help with my graduate admissions. We're already on the process of writing the research paper, but my professor told me he's planning on delaying its publication so he can work on another project while getting funding for the work we're doing. So I have two questions about this:


Is this a common practice in a professional level?
What can I do to get this paper going? Even if it's not published. I was thinking about presenting a preprint as part of my applications, but I'm not sure if it'll work since it hasn't started a peer-review process or something of that matter.
Doing research means working on questions for which the answer
is unknown, and in fact may remain unknown for a long time.
Unfortunately, this simple fact is only moderately compatible
with project-based research funding, since funding agencies
would like to know right now what you're going to discover
in the next two years. Some funding agencies have a rather
relaxed attitude in this matter: My late doctoral advisor
used to begin every project progress report with the statement
"We had promised to investigate A, but in the meantime our
interests have changed, and so we've rather investigated B"
and he always got away with it, because the funding agency was
only interested in the number of publications. But if a
funding agency gets picky when comparing project proposals
and progress reports, things become more difficult. In such cases,
researchers are often tempted to simplify
writing the progress reports by
putting those problems into the project proposal for which they
already have a rather good idea how to solve them, but no publication yet.