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reinhart-rogoff

To commit a minor error in one's research which, once discovered, puts its original results in major jeopardy.

Shortly after my article was accepted for publication in a scholarly journal, I panicked when I realized I had reinhart-rogoffed, due to an error I had discovered in a line of my code.

by Pseudolus130 February 19, 2016


Reinhart-Rogoff

verb: to show that someone's entire thesis is wrong because they made a minor data entry typo. Named for an incident in 2013 where an important academic paper that related high national debt to reduced GDP (written by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) was revealed to be based on an Excel fat-finger. (They had averaged all visible cells in a row, but not all cells in the entire row, as they'd intended.) This was unfortunate, because the Reinhart-Rogoff paper had substantially (and, it turned out, incorrectly) influenced U.S. fiscal policy during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011.

I've posted the full data supporting this paper on GitHub, in case y'all want to try and Reinhart-Rogoff me.

by BCSWowbagger2 August 15, 2023