Years ago I worked in a neurophysiology lab. Sometimes we would spend months collecting data that ended up not showing what the director of the lab was after. So we would then look at the logarithms of the raw data and plot those numbers. Or whatever needed done until we could have some cool graphs showing straight lines/curves/whatever would look good on the printed page.
The PhD I worked for called this process “being practical”.
Also known as “Quarterly Expense Report” or “Master’s Thesis”
Retrofitting?
Rationalization?
If “creative accountancy” is used to describe “cooking the books” to create or appear to create the desired financial outcome, how about “creative research”?
Well, my statistics prof called studies that did that ex post facto.
I had a prof that used a term that I rather liked (once I looked up what it meant).
Procrustean statistics.
Ah, Procrustes; take me right back to my Sinclair programming days (the idea of procrustean string handling was mentioned in the manual for either the ZX Spectrum or ZX81).
Fudging?
Fudge, as in “Fudging the numbers” At least that’s what we called it in physics class, when we decided what we wanted out standard deviation to be, and then worked backwards to come up with better data points.
Another vote for fudging.
This is a relevant and amusing link
Monkey with the results.