Data Can Appear in Journals — Out of Thin Air | Evolution News
While many researchers decried the results, University of Copenhagen econometrician Søren Johansen said something worth pondering.
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“The reason it’s cheating isn’t that he’s done it, but that he hasn’t written it down,” adding, “It’s pretty egregious.”
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Recently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.”
But That Wasn’t the Big Surprise
The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors:
"In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values and dragged the selected cells down or up, depending on the case. The program then filled in the blanks. If the new numbers turned negative, Heshmati replaced them with the last positive value Excel had spit out. “No data? No problem!” …
"But it got worse. Heshmati’s data, which the student convinced him to share, showed that in several instances where there were no observations to use for the autofill operation, the professor had taken the values from an adjacent country in the spreadsheet. New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom."
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