I am a PhD student and my supervisor absolutely wants me to publish an article with results from my master's thesis (done 2 years ago). I started writing the paper, but the more I write, the more I feel that it is not that good, results are hard if not impossible to replicate, methodology is a bit "hacky" (parameters were chosen at random, do not work in every case, etc.). Well, in short, I consider it unfinished and think that we could do better and need extra work on it before publishing. I also want to point out that this paper is not related to my PhD thesis. My question is, should I pursue this paper, and if not, how to communicate this to my supervisor without being rude and/or arrogant (after all, I'm a student and he's the supervisor).
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1 Answer
Most research is never finished - it can always be further improved. At some point you have to say "this is enough to write about".
If it's not to do with your PhD then the chances are that you aren't going to go back and work on it more, so the choice isn't whether to do some more work on it, it's "is this good enough to publish as is?"
Of course we can't comment on whether your masters thesis is "finished enough" - but your supervisor is likely to have a better idea than you do.
I would recommend expressing your concerns to your supervisor and seeing what they say.
