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by jvanderbot 93 days ago
I'm not sure what experience anyone in this thread has with grad level research as a student/author, but I can assure you that heads roll over this kind of thing.

A professor's career is built on reputation, and that reputation is as strong as their students' (who do much of the "work" such as it is). It comes down to the professor, but this can be a career-ending moment for those students and I'm quite confident there were some very uncomfortable discussions as a result of this.

1 comments

Depends on the field. One of the most influential papers in economics was found to be incorrectly constructed with signs pointing to just straight up fraud. Basically it didn't include data that it said it did, which when included reverses the conclusion. Then when the authors were called out, they doubled down offering up the explanation that the conclusion again reverses if you add a third set of cherry picked data, followed by dragging the person calling them out through the mud in a NY Times opinion piece.

Those authors are still extremely prestigious professors in the field, and have suffered essentially no penalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

All due respect this is by no means one of the most influential papers in economics.
It literally crushed economies and guided international monetary policy for at least a decade.

There's a reason why it's one of the only economic papers that has its own wiki page.

Not influential on economics research, but on economic policy.