| Torillian said: I gotta tell ya as a scientist I take a little offense to the idea that scientists fudge their numbers a little all the time. Every instance I've ever heard of any fudging has always ended up in the ostricization of that professor and complete loss of funding and credibility. It's like being an artist and people find out you plagiarize. At that point you're below a new comer because anything you put out there won't be trusted. And trust is huge in the scientific community because everytime you put out an article you have to run it past other scientists who are often in the same field working on competing aspects. Any reason not to trust your data will be huge, might as well just quit at that point. |
I was thinking more in the case if they had a hypothesis in mind and their numbers didn't quite match the trend in mind. They could shift a number by .1% or something along the lines and account it as error. I didn't really mean all the time, a bit more like often and I did not mean to offend you. Now that I think about it, peer review would probably minimize that fudging. Sorry.
