How Science (Econometrics?) is Really Done

If you tweet, you may be familiar with #OverlyHonestMethods. If not, this link to Popular Science will set you on the right track. As it says: "In 140 characters or less, the info that didn't get through peer review."

Here are some beauties that may strike an accord with certain applied econometricians:

• "Our results were non-significant at p > 0.05, but they're humdingers at p > 0.1"
• "Experiment was repeated until we had three statistically significant similar results and could discard the outliers"
• "We decided to use Technique Y because it's new and sexy, plus hot and cool. And because we could."
• "I can't send you the original data because I don't remember what my excel file names mean anymore."
• "Non-linear regression analysis was performed in Graph Pad Prism because SPSS is a nightmare."
• "We made a thorough comparison of all post-hoc tests while our statistician wasn't looking."
• "Our paper lacks post-2010 references as it's taken the co-authors that long to agree on where to submit the final draft."
• "If you pay close attention to our degrees-of-freedom you will realize we have no idea what test we actually ran."
• "Additional variables were not considered because everyone involved is tired of working on this paper."
• "We used jargon instead of plain English to prove that a decade of grad school and postdoc made us smart."

Oh yes!!!!

© 2013, David E. Giles