> 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.
The most charitable interpretation is that the professor has no idea what autofill is or isn't capable of doing, so he misused it.
"Um, both countries start with the letter N"
When he dragged down a selection he _saw_ the values being copied or a trend being extrapolated.
But neither these tools nor an LLM has real understanding, they're not going out into the real world and collecting data. The results need to be verified. Automatically filling an index column with 1,2,3... is one thing, automatically filling a data column with guesses from pattern matching is different. This problem is only going to get worse as LLMs proliferate and can more reliably but still imperfectly and still opaquely fill in more complicated data.
It sounds like he didn't realize or notice that autofill was using adjacent cells (from other countries, in this instance). That behavior would shock me as well. I thought autofill only took columns of data into account.
No, it doesn’t sound like 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.”
It was not Excel’s fault.
If they'd been using R/Matlab/Python written by a copilot it would have been just as much gibberish.
The headline isn't blaming Excel. "Undisclosed tinkering in Excel" is not far from the accurate headline: "Misuse of commonly-used Excel tool..."
The interesting thing is that a supposedly sophisticated person was using an unsophisticated tool and then relying on the data it produced. Failing to mention "Excel" in this case is doing a disservice to the thrust of the problem.
The tools have nothing to do with it, and the same could have been done with paper and pencil. Autocomplete is the problem, it just repeats a single number or a series, and when using it you see exactly what the results were.
This was not done by mistake or in ignorance or because the tool encouraged them, it was done to knowingly falsify incomplete data so that they could finish their paper and publish.
In combination with the (reportedly)blatant lack of any reference to the methodology in his paper this feels like wilful gross misconduct in professor-land.
IMO this sort of thing rightly undermines confidence and credibility of research in a much broader context and should be a sackable matter if shown to be true as asserted.
That isn't to diminish when Excel's help has disastrous consequences, but rather to say it shouldn't be unexpected. If your data requires precision, there are better tools than Excel for working with your data and there should be steps taken by more experienced members of the team to ensure the team doesn't get bit by Excel's features. Excel's behaviors are well known and I'd have to imagine at least one member of any research team has been bitten by Excel's assistance features before during research. I would be surprised if any serious educational institution that teaches about ethics and common pitfalls in research *didn't* caution about how Excel might corrupt research [0].
0 - Okay, maybe not _that_ surprised, but I would be disappointed and think less of the institution/instructor.
To compare OECD countries.
What’s the point of even doing the research?