AEA Data and Code Guidance
Guidance for authors wishing to create data and code supplements, and for replicators.
Unofficial guidance on various topics by the AEA Data Editor
These web pages provide unofficial and developing guidance on the implementation of the American Economic Association (AEA)’s Data and Code Availability Policy. We also provide links to generic guidance being developed by a loose collective (“guild”) of data editors and people in a similar role at various social science journals.
Order in which AEA authors should read these resources
- Start with the official Data and Code Availability Policy
- Look for general guidance at the Social Science Data Editors pages
- Read the AEA’s FAQ
- The Unofficial AEA Data and Code Guidance provides guidance specific to the AEA
- Have a look at the draft FAQ on this site for thorny issues
Comments are welcome, please file them as issues in our Github repo.
Guidance on creating replicable data and program archives
How should researchers create replicable data and program archives? How should such archives be structured, how documented, and where should they be located?
- Several economics and other social science data editors are collaborating on common guidance. See https://social-science-data-editors.github.io/guidance/ for more detailed guidance.
- A README template recommended by multiple data editors in economics can be used as a starting point for a data and code archive’s master README.
- Issues about licensing are complex, we suggest the Social Science Data Editor’s discussion of licensing. The AEA Data and Code Repository defaults to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) license; however, we suggest that authors choose a hybrid license when their repository contains data, code and software, as the CC-BY license is not recommended for software.
Guidance on data citation
Data citation is critical for documenting data provenance, and the AEA requires data citations. But data citations can also be hard.
- General guidance can be found on the Social Science Data Editor’s page on the topic
- Some particularly thorny issues can be found [on this website](https://social-science-data-editors.github.io/guidance/addtl-data-citation-guidance.html.
Guidance on depositing in the AEA Data and Code Repository
The AEA migrated to a new data and code repository in July 2019. See
- the official Data and Code Availability Policy,
- the associated FAQ,
- detailed additional guidance on these pages, and the draft FAQ on this site
Guidance on testing replicability of code
The code and data that have been archived should be reproducible and replicable. How do we test that?
- Generic guidance is provided at the Social Science Data Editors’ Guidance website.
- At the AEA,
- we use this template to guide our replicators.
- We assess
- software availability
- data availability
- code availability and clarity
- needed computational resources
- time needed to acquire or use all of the above, and conduct the reproducibility check
- When some of the conditions are not met with our own resources, we may ask others to conduct a reproducibility exercise for us.
- Our PROTOCOL is outlined here.
- Sample report 1
- We may ask others to do so because
- They are experts
- They have access to the software
- They have access to the data
- They have access to computational resources needed
- No reproducibility check is discarded out of hand
Frequently Asked Questions
- Start by consulting the FAQ on the AEA Website. This generally apply specifically to procedures at the AEA journals.
- AEA-specific updates and additions will first appear in draft FAQ on this site
- More general questions will have answers at the Social Science Data Editors FAQ