structural:summarization, information:classification
Data selection controversy

There is some controversy over selectivity in Millikan's use of results from his second experiment measuring the electron charge. This issue has been discussed by Allan Franklin, a former high-energy experimentalist and current philosopher of science at the University of Colorado. Franklin contends that Millikan's exclusions of data do not affect the final value of the charge obtained, but that Millikan's substantial "cosmetic surgery" reduced the statistical error. This enabled Millikan to give the charge of the electron to better than one-half of one percent. In fact, if Millikan had included all of the data he discarded, the error would have been less than 2%. While this would still have resulted in Millikan's having measured the charge of e better than anyone else at the time, the slightly larger uncertainty might have allowed more disagreement with his results within the physics community, which Millikan likely tried to avoid. David Goodstein argues that Millikan's statement, that all drops observed over a 60 day period were used in the paper, was clarified in a subsequent sentence that specified all "drops upon which complete series of observations were made". Goodstein attests that this is indeed the case and notes that five pages of tables separate the two sentences.