What do you make of Reinhart and Rogoff’s rebuttal to this criticism? They acknowledge the excel error but dispute the rest. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/reinhart-and-rogo...
They published a paper that claimed they ran analysis X. Reviewers look at it, and believed them, because we usually don't assume that people are lying. And it's hard to read over every line of code and compare it to the paper to make sure they did run the analysis they claimed.
But in reality, they did a totally different analysis. They hid data, they fudged data, they inserted weighting factors into the analysis. And they never mentioned in this in the paper.
In the article, they claim this was justified.
But hiding the true nature of the analysis they did was not. That hiding, of making the paper read one way but the code another, is plan and simple scientific fraud.
If what they believed in reality is that the code is correct, and that's the better analysis, then they should have just reported in the paper. The reason they didn't, is because reviewers would have looked at it and said that this is unacceptable and doesn't meet basic scientific standards. So they lied.