[raid2000]

I expected to read a paper about some obscure Excel trick to manipulate stats output. Instead, this is just old-fashioned manipulation by hand or "imputation" as the paper describes it.

> In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, 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.

[MostlyStable]

The crazy thing about it is that the author doesn't seem to understand why it's bad. He doesn't appear to be hiding it. He just says "yeah that's what I did, whoops, I forgot to say it in the paper". He's either decided that acting like a complete moron is better than being thought of as an an intentional fraud, or else he really does think it was totally above board.

[richbell]

I had a similar thought. My interpretation is that he genuinely thinks what he did was ok, because Excel has computer magic.

This quote seems unintentionally telling:

> "If we do not use imputation, such data is almost useless,” Heshmati said. He added that the description of the data in the paper as “balanced” referred to “the final data” – that is, the mended dataset.