Keeping track

These slides are all about transparency and reproducibility (for your future self and for others). Some other resources…

• Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
• Julian Reif’s Guide for Replication with Stata

Reproducibility

• You’ll need to come back to this one day!
• Others will (hopefully) ask you about this
• “I lost my hard drive” is unacceptable!

Automation

One benefit of good tracking and workflow is that you partially automate your projects…

• No repeating commands in the command line
• No copying and pasting values into tables
• No copying and pasting values into the text (harder to do)

Naming files

Avoid spaces in file names. Avoid them at all costs. DO NOT PUT SPACES IN YOUR FILE NAMES.

“A space in a file name is a space in your soul.”

Naming files

Avoid things like this…

great-research-idea
|
|---analysis
|   |   final_analysis.R
|   |   final_final_analysis.R
|   |   last_analysis.R
|
|---data
|   |   clean_data.csv
|   |   extra_clean_data.csv
|
|---paper
|   |   draft1.tex
|   |   final_draft.tex
|   |   final_final_draft.tex

Naming files

• Use dates in your filenames if necessary (YYYYMMDD format)
• Minimize the use of filename dates and instead try official version control
• Dates useful in log files and similar output (not under version control)

Data workflow

Some quick thoughts on workflow…

1. Avoid absolute path names!