I'm due to be giving a paper at the weekend at a PG conference but I submitted the abstract a long time ago based on some work I was doing which I later decided was rubbish. I was hoping there would be something salvageable but having just been over it and my supervisors' notes I realize that to get anything decent out of it would require a huge amount of work and I'm already behind on other work for upgrade. Which do you think would be worse: to spend today, tomorrow and Friday working on it in spite of the fact that I'm pretty certain the results will still be very flawed, or face up to the fact that it's rubbish and withdraw the paper even though it will look really unprofessional? :-(

Tough one, I am not sure what I would do. I think it depends on what kind of PG conference it is. If it is informal, lets say organised by your faculty, then withdrawing might be the quickest, easiest way out of it and no one has come to harm. But if the conference would be useful for networking etc, then going and having something to talk about would be better. Also, you say, it might be possible to get something out of it, albeit somewhat flawed, but as long as there is something new, original in the work/approach/results, it could be interesting for your audience. You could pretend(?!) that the work is not completely finished and so the results are preliminary? However if there is nothing to get out of the work, then withrawing might be the best option, if you don't want to completely discredit yourself.
This is really a difficult decision...

i would say present.

i once presented a rubbish paper which did not even flow, so i used slides and handed the rubbish draft out to the participants at an international conference. am now happily cutting and pasting paragraphs of that now 'published in a peer-reviewed journal' paper, which would not have got to that level had i not dared to present it into my thesis. just mention to them that the work is crap and you are presenting to get feedback to establish where the missing link is. if you mention this at the beginning, people will be very helpful. it's not always about performing. it's about learning from each other. it also shows you are a mature researcher. just say you want one last set of views before totally disregarding it. that shows them you actually know its crap and shows them that their views are important.

let us know what you decide.

all the best.

I would say present as well. It's experience, even if it doesnt go well, it will look good on the CV that you have produced a paper at a conference.(up)

Well, I thought I'd asked my supervisor and she said she thought it would be better to do it and think of it as a presentation not an article, tell them it's work in progress and just go through the material even if there are no clear conclusions. I've therefore isolated the bits with the fewest 'what on earth are you talking about?' type supervisory scribbles, cut and pasted and am just starting to go through them trying to patch them up. It's not going to look much like what my abstract promised though. Do you think that is a huge problem? I've changed paper titles before but never veered quite so far away from what I'd proposed. It's still on the same material but it will be much more of an overview than the argument I originally proposed to fit the conference theme. :-(

I wouldn't worry too much about what you present being different to your abstract- so many conferences require the abstract a long way in advance so it is inevitable that things will change between then and now. Just acknowledge that it is 'work in progress' or that you are now addressing the limitations of it in your current research or something to that effect and you should be fine! Good luck with it! KB