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Confounding Referencing
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• The misleading use of references which either overstates or gives an entirely false impression of support for a claim or obstructs evidence appraisal.
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Cryptic references
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• An opaque reference that provides insufficient information to easily locate the original source and which serves to obstruct evidence appraisal.
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Faux sources / False authority
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• A faux source involves providing an incorrect source for key data. The concept overlaps with an appeal to a false authority, where an alleged authority is used as evidence to support a claim, which, in fact, is not an authority on the facts relevant to the claim.
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Out-of-place citations
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• References that give a false impression of support for a proposition as a result of being misplaced in the text. These take various forms and can be used to validate illicit generalisations or simply provide a faux source for a key proposition.
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Vapid out-of-place citations
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• A hybrid confounding reference (combining an out-of-place citation and a faux source) which contains relatively useless contextual information that fails to support, and has no direct relevance, to the claim in the text.
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Source laundering
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• Provision of a relatively independent source which obscures the use of industry data as the underlying support for the proposition.
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Inaccessible source
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• The use of a source that is not publicly available.
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Misleading Summaries
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• Inaccurate reporting of objectives, findings, and conclusions of sources.
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Absence of evidence as evidence of absence
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• A logical fallacy aimed at representing a relationship that has not been satisfactorily explored as evidence that no relationship exists (usually used in combination with other techniques, such as omission of qualifying information).
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False attribution of focus
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• Misrepresentation of the focus of studies.
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Omission of important qualifying information
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• A specific variant of strategic ignorance characterised by precise but inaccurate reporting of study findings in which important qualifying information that significantly changes the implications of the findings is omitted.
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Selective quotation
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• Reporting extracts either out of context or by omitting qualifying information to give a misleading impression of either the study quoted or the research upon which it is based.
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Simple misstatement of key/study findings
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• Erroneously and unambiguously claiming that a study has produced a specific finding.
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‘The Tweezers Method’
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• The practice of picking phrases out of context from peer-reviewed studies with the effect of changing the emphasis and/or intended meaning of the original text.
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Acalculiac rounding-up
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• Rounding-up estimates without cause or explanation.
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Double-counting
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• Counting an economic impact (or part of an impact) more than once.
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Illicit Generalisation
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• A logical fallacy where the underlying evidence is insufficiently developed to support an inductive generalisation.
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Evidential Landscaping
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• Either promoting alternative evidence (a parallel evidence base) to shift the evidential basis upon which the policy is being discussed and evaluated or purposefully excluding relevant evidence
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Data dredging (misuse of raw data)
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• Presenting and/or analysing data to depict relationships or trends that either misrepresent actual relationships or obscure other contradictory relationships and/or trends in the data.
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Unmodelled data (misuse of raw data)
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• Homespun trend analysis summarising patterns across time that ignores key confounding variables or pre-existing/underlying trends. In this latter sense, unmodelled data may involve a faux counterfactual, where the impact of an intervention is not appropriately explored by comparing the world in which the intervention occurred with the world in which it did not.
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Observational Selection/Cherry-Picking
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• The practice of highlighting individual studies or data to support a pre-determined conclusion, whilst ignoring contradictory (and typically stronger) evidence.
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The ‘Hens’ teeth’ technique
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• An egregious form of cherry-picking that involves foregrounding obscure, outlying studies.
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Passé Source
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• Cherry-picking an older source to support an assumption, which although fairly reflecting the state of scientific knowledge when published has since been superseded by developments in the evidence-base.
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Strategic ignorance
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• The technique of ignoring findings and evidence-backed observations in cited sources that contradict unsupported or weakly supported claims.
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Syncopated Estimation
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• Missing or failing to fully articulate key steps in economic modelling (including, but not limited to, the failure to: provide a range of estimates to reflect uncertainties in assumptions; fairly review the literature relevant to specifying assumptions; provide a clear and comprehensive assessment of assumptions).
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Black-box Computation (information asymmetries)
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• Opaque, unverifiable steps in economic modelling.
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Inaccessible Data (information asymmetries)
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• The reliance on privately held data in economic assessments.
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