(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper | Retraction Watch

2024-02-17 21:51:52+00:00

We are all worried about LLMs; meanwhile, Economics Professors are using Excel Autofill and copypasta from random countries to flesh-out datasets:

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. … 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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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/109196#comment-263976
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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