My supervisor encouraged me to apply for a conference presentation, as he had funding for me to go. The problem was that I had no results at the time, since the conference date was six months after the abstract deadline. At the time I thought I would have results in time so I wrote an abstract (stating what I plan to do and why it is important, but posted no results) and got accepted for a poster presentation.
Now it is 1 week before the conference and I have very poor results. I was able to complete the experiment, but the the results are much too poor to present. Unfortunately I have no time to redo anything and do not have any previous research (am a masters student). Which one of these is worse?:
- Presenting meaningless results just so you can present
- Presenting a vague poster (show the theory, methodology, importance, but no tangible results) to get around poor data.
- Not showing up to the conference and get a partial refund.