Saturday, December 13, 2014

When Did You Last Check Your Code?

Chris Blattman (Columbua U.) has a blog directed towards international development, economics, politics, and policy.

In a post yesterday, Chris asks: "What happens when a very good political science journal checks the statistical code of its submissions?"

The answer is not pretty!

His post relates to the practice of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science to subject empirical papers to in-house replication. This involves running the code provided by authors. He cites a batch of 24 such papers in which only 4 were found to be error-free.

Have you checked you own code recently?


© 2014, David E. Giles