OK I'll try to make this short: >be me >doing a STEM

go somewhere else and attempt Z

>>8763805
Get the data together and present it to the dean or the principal/rector. Tell them that you suspect fraud. You can also contact the journal that published the professor's results.

Ask your professor to help you get Y out of X. If your professor can't get it to work either, then you have a nice "X doesn't Y after all" paper.

>>8763816
Fraud need not enter into it, and likely doesn't. Fuckups are very common in science, that's exactly WHY you do replications.

>>8763835
>Ask your professor to help you get Y out of X. If your professor can't get it to work either, then you have a nice "X doesn't Y after all" paper.

I already showed him the results like I said in the OP. But he wasn't happy with it and told me to do it again. I've repeated the experiment nearly 20 times now but then he changed his tone saying I should stop wasting my time on X. Like dude, my entire topic depends on X doing Y so I can then move forward trying to prove that X does A, B, C, D etc.

>>8763844
So stop being a little bitch and tell him that. Ask him to help you get Y to work because you need it.

>>8763805
Does the journal have the supplementary data?

>>8763849
dude, I DID ask him. but he's like "go do the experiment again till I get X doing Y". wtf is he expecting, that I just make up some results showing X does Y when it doesn't?

>>8763852
yeah it does but I can't replicate the result despite following the method described in the paper step by step. Even had a post doc to help me with it and he couldn't replicate it either.

>>8763868
Well, then perhaps it's time to find a professor who actually deserves the title.

>>8763868
>wtf is he expecting, that I just make up some results showing X does Y

Yes.

That is exactly what he expects.

This is your initiation and your professor is just testing you without implicating himself directly.

You have to fake it till you make it in science.

It is extremely rare to replicate most of scientific research today.

If you don't have the stomach to fake results then go ahead and just drop out like a little bitch

>>8763877
lmfao

>>8763868
go to him again. walk him through exactly what you did. explain to him calmly that youve done this 20+ times and you cant get it to work. you feel you need to know how to do this yourself before you start building off of previous work.

you could also check papers that cited his work if it is such high impact. they likely were able to repeat the experiment and build off of it.

if you do the same thing over and over with no results, your professor is going to be more upset than if you just ask until you get it right. any other graduate students in your lab willing to give you a hand??

im really curious what it is you are doing. like is this some sort of chemistry experiment? or are you proving a theorem or something?

>>8763805
report your professor. he is in fault for making you do fake research, you don't owe him anything.
If your field isn't filled with crooks you'll likely find another one

>>8764043
>implying whistleblowing will not burn bridges and effectively blacklist OP from most employers once the word gets out

>>8764268
>blacklist him from employers

he wont make it through grad school if he gets that rep before his examinations

>>8763805
PhD in stem here also

(One of) my supervisors is associate professor level and has published quite a few papers that I used as a starting point for my research. It took about 6 months of independent study to figure out a number of crucial flaws in his working, and the general approach to the models he created.

These are papers that were peer reviewed without a problem in A grade papers.

It really is kind of amazing how much garbage gets through the cracks when no one is paying close attention. The awkwardness of me having to bring these flaws to his attention and try to explain why several of his equations and assumptions were wrong was the worst part.

>>8765045
what happened next? was your prof supportive?

>>8763805
Can you not just report that X does indeed not equal Y?
Not saying you have to bust down a door and claim your professor a fraud but you would think proving something wrong is more impressive to your PhD than recreating it.
I'm not in your shoes so I don't grasp the whole of your situation.

>>8765451
He sort of made out like I was wrong or that both ways of doing it were OK, and gave a few vague explanations.

I didn't want to cause too much drama because I would be working with this guy for the next few years and would end up doing quite independent work anyway. We've since published a few papers together, 95% of it is my original ideas. He often tries to get me to re-use models that he's come up with (which are flawed) and I politely try to avoid doing so.

My other supervisor is professor level (has been researching for about 40 years) and is quite well known in the world in his field (maybe in the top 100). We all work on the same research project but quite independently most of the time, so this hasn't been too much of an ongoing issue.

Academia is fraught with this type of bullshit though. It really sheds light on some of the claims about climate science being filled with garbage data and modelling. Seeing it first hand (although in quite a different STEM field) makes you realise that it really is possible.