Just think of all the cases where the people are not faking stuff in such an obvious way. When they know to just add a bit of noise or not outright use the same picture but modify it here and there etc. Fuck it is so wide spread and we still do not value copying reproducing results nearly as much as new results.
Autofill is a bad way to interpolate data. If you're going to do it, you gotta have an idea of how to do it more realistically and obviously comment on the choice.
I can imagine him doing this without even noticing how much data he made up. When a spreadsheet is big enough that the filtered parameters take up more than a screen, you don't really notice if you autofill 100 or 1000 or 100000 lines. It's just "top to bottom" anyway.
From the immortal Journal of Irreproducible Results, "The Data Enrichment Method":
". . .its principal shortcoming is that before the enrichment process can be started, some data must be collected. It is quite true that a great deal is done with very little information, but this should not blind one to the fact that the method still embodies the 'raw-data flaw'. The ultimate objective, complete freedom from the inconvenience and embarrassment of experimental results, still lies unattained before us."
How do you define the two terms? I'm genuinely curious since the definitions I've seen for the terms imply that it is a type of plagiarism, but they definitely don't have the same connotations.
A ghostwriter is usually someone hired to produce a piece of written work, with set terms like deadlines, payment, possibly confidentiality, and other things. Things like memoirs (even some presidents') are ghostwritten by someone who listens to rambling stories and takes notes to produce something readable.
Plagiarism suggests Person B presenting Person A's work as their own without Person A or their intended audience knowing that fact. In this scenario there is no compensation for the claimed work and presumably no communication or cooperation between the writer and plagiarizer.
Thanks for the comment, that was very insightful. I'm not sure I fully agree with this definition of plagiarism in academia though, but rather I am familiar with a broader one that includes both willful prearranged plagiarism and even self plagiarism.
In academia, the main discriminating factor to establish plagiarism would be the presence or absence of references, so in this case it would mean that the review would have had to include the ghostwriter as an author directly (and hence wouldn't be a ghostwriter anymore 😉
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