Hello,

A portion of my PhD work has been to convert raw crack length data (optical measurements) into crack growth rate through MATLAB code. We have recently been asked to put our data into a standard file format so I have been going back and putting the raw data and running the conversion code and I found that some of my old data is giving different converted results than I had originally reported.

This has not been the case for all of my data, but for some sets it is somehow different (the raw data is the same) so I must have made some error when I originally did the conversions.

This does not change the conclusions from the data but it does change the scatter of the data. My question is - how can I tell me advisor about this? Is this a fire able offense? What are the ethical implications of this? None of this has been published as of yet but I am very concerned with the implications. Please help!!

I wouldn't worry, I'm sure we have all done this! Be honest with your advisor, and just take it as a learning experience. We all make mistakes.