Study on climate-economy link retracted after Uzbekistan data anomaly found
Researchers discovered a published paper's findings were driven almost entirely by faulty data from Uzbekistan, including a 90% GDP drop across all provinces in 2020.
What to know
- A published study modeling climate effects on regional economies was found to have its core findings driven by corrupted Uzbekistan data showing an implausible 90% GDP drop across all provinces in 2020.
- The original authors cropped charts to hide outliers, obscuring Uzbekistan and other anomalies from view in the published version.
- The discovery raises questions about whether the errors were due to incompetence or intentional manipulation, and highlights broader concerns about data integrity in published research.
The dispute Whether the chart cropping and data issues reflect incompetence, negligence, or deliberate misconduct. · positions read across 10 posts and comments
This reveals deliberate or grossly negligent data handling that calls the authors' integrity into question.
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“Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or malicious.”
Aurornis · Hacker News ↗
Data integrity problems are systemic across academia and require coordinated efforts to identify and correct.
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“We need something akin to the international geophysical year, but for data integrity. Make it an interdisciplinary priority to clean house and root out papers that are hanging by a thread of included / excluded outliers, biased samples…”
MarkusQ · Hacker News ↗
The underlying modeling approach or dataset quality was the real problem, not necessarily intentional misconduct.
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“My read is that the model had too much variance; more regularization was needed.”
esafak · Hacker News ↗
Original study authors Researchers behind retracted paperReproduction team Researchers who discovered the issue
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 10 voices from 2 sites · verbatim
- Aug 23
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> Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or maliciousIt reminds me of the famous "hide the decline", when the climate scientists working on the famous "hockey stick" paper discussed how to hide in the graphs the recent decline of proxy temperatures while measured temperatures kept growing (which…
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All else aside I mean how can they even claim to predict what an economy will do in 100 years anyway, it's going to adapt to complex higher order effects. Maybe climate change will increase GDP of everyone has to hire a worker to fan them with palm leaves.
- Aug 22
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This is partly why I don’t worry about “LLM slop” — we had plenty of artisanal human slop before.
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Figure 1a (the leftmost subfigure in TFA’s lead image) shows the data for Uzbekistan from the DOSEv1 dataset (green), DOSEv2 dataset (red) and World Bank (black). The authors of the retracted study used the DOSEv2 dataset in order to model climate effects on the economy at a sub-national level, as opposed to the country-level analyses used in…
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> We wanted to see why Uzbekistan didn’t jump out, so we reproduced it in our comment (Extended Data Fig 1). It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the biggest outlier, but that the version they had published had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see the outliers (see red boxes in our version). This seemed indicative of a different issue, which…
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Makes me wonder how many more papers out there have hard-to-pin-down errors like thatAnd how useful potentially AI could be to spot those (even if retrospectively)
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I'm confused as to what the actual issue was. What was the data for which Uzbekistan was the outlier and why?
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We need something akin to the international geophysical year, but for data integrity. Make it an interdisciplinary priority to clean house and root out papers that are hanging by a thread of included / excluded outliers, biased samples, and outright fraud. It would be humbling, but we'd be in much better shape afterwards.
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My read is that the model had too much variance; more regularization was needed.
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H
One Night in Uzbekistan L: https:// statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu /2026/08/20/we-couldnt-reproduce-their-findings-and-realized-that-it-was-all-driven-by-weird-data-from-uzbekistan/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9392536 posted on 2026.08.21 at 15:05:50 (c=0, p=10)