Blog posts

2024

On the use and reuse of within-project code

5 minute read

We often see researchers handle variants of their analysis by copying and pasting code, or by copying code files into separate directories, and making only m...

On the use and redistribution of data

5 minute read

Many researchers are confused by the difference between “use” and “(re-)distribution” of data. In a nutshell, just because you are able to freely use the dat...

Random notes from the AMAs

1 minute read

In the AMAs (see past and future AMAs), we talked about many things. No transcript, but here’s a raw dump of the various websites that were used.

2023

NDAs, DUAs in the verification process

10 minute read

Toni Whited (EIC of Journal of Financial Economics) had the following question on the ex-bird site: Econ and finance journals are getting their acts toge...

The oldest replication package, overall?

less than 1 minute read

After our recent discussion about the oldest AEA replication package, I navigated over to the really old archive at the Journal of Applied Econometrics. Surp...

The oldest AEA replication package

1 minute read

We were recently discussing among data editors what the oldest replication package (in Econ and Political Science) might be.

DCAS v1.0 Compliance Self-Assessment

11 minute read

On 2022-12-15, various data editors, including myself, launched the Data and Code Availability Standard (DCAS). In this post, I will do a self-assessment o...

2022

Launching DCAS

less than 1 minute read

The data editors of the journals of the American Economic Association1, of the Royal Economic Society2, the Review of Economic Studies, the Canadian Journa...

What is this LICENSE thing

6 minute read

The template README required by various econ journals asks for a statement about the rights to RE-distribute data. Many economists are confused by this: “But...

2021

Software, code, and repositories

4 minute read

A short thread on software, code, versioning, citation, and repositories. Only very few AEA articles reference Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket repositories. More sho...

File paths in statistical software

less than 1 minute read

A short thread (PSA) on a FOC (frequently occurring problem) that shouldn’t be one: file paths in statistical software.

Reproducible GIS

2 minute read

A note on reproducible GIS by economists: it’s mostly absent. Here are some tips.

A Day in the Life of a Data Editor

3 minute read

I wanted to illustrate the range of the various topics that a Data Editor might face, by taking a fairly random day (2021-01-29) and listing all the various ...

Follow-up to Fireside Chat

11 minute read

In this post, I’ll pick up questions that have been asked over Twitter or during the 2021-01-19 Fireside chat, in long form (Twitter is not always the best m...

2020

Release of a template README

2 minute read

We have released the first version of a template README for social sciences at https://social-science-data-editors.github.io/template_README/.