system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can you ask to be removed as an author from a paper?

I am a co author on a paper of a former fellow PhD student. I contributed minimally to the paper (extracted DNA from samples and sequences). The topic is something I know about and researching during my current postdoc. 

The issue is that I don’t think the methods is done correctly or the data interpreted properly. We have yet to see the final manuscript (I got a sneak peek of the partial manuscript). 

Can I ask to be removed as an author from the paper? Or is any publication seen as good? I want to progress within this field and don’t know how bad it would be if my name is on a subpar paper.
gpt
Situations like this are not uncommon.  An approach to handling this that I've used is to (1) provide them comments on the manuscript expressing concerns and (perhaps) ways to fix it and (2) let them know that it might be a lot of work, that you understand that they might not want to/are able to do the edits, in which case you don't want to hold them back so its okay to just leave you off of the paper.