For the checklist, see previous page.

This document describes how to prepare your code for verification in detail, taking into account some of the most frequent issues that the Data Editor and his team have encountered in submitted replication packages.

⚠️❗ IMPORTANT: At this point, you should only be seeing this page if you were asked by the Data Editor team to do so, and if your replication package relies on a single software. Admissible containers are listed in the Step 5 section: authorized containers. We are not currently attempting to generalize this to multi-software replication packages, though it is possible to do so.

Detailed instructions

Preliminary: Directory structure of a replication package

A generic replication package, housed at /my/computer/users/me/project, might have the following structure:

README.pdf
data/
   raw/
      cps0001.dat
   analysis/
      combined_data.dta
      combined_data.csv
      combined_data_codebook.pdf
code/
  01_readcps.do
  02_readfred.do
  03_table1-5.do
  04_figures1-4.do
results/
  table1.tex
  table2.xlsx
  ...
  figure1.png
  figure2.pdf

where

• data/raw has the externally acquired raw data files (not modified by the authors)
• data/analysis has the processed data files, generated by the code in this repository. It starts out empty, and may not exist.
• code has the code files.
• results has all the results files.

For illustration purposes, we have used Stata .do files, and outputs in a variety of formats, but the same principles apply to other software, and to any output formats.

Note that we did not specify where the main.do file will be!

Short-cut

If you want to include the key code pieces for Stata that are needed to comply with Steps 1-3, you can use this code fragment. Note that you do not HAVE to use this specific code, if your code already has equivalent features!