Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

Reproducibility has come a long way in political science. Many major journals now require replication materials be made available either on their websites or some service such as the Dataverse Network . Most of the top journals in political science have formally committed to reproducible research best practices by signing up to the The (DA-RT) Data Access and Research Transparency Joint Statement . This is certainly progress. But what are political scientists actually supposed to do with this new information? Data and code availability does help avoid effort duplication--researchers don't need to gather data or program statistical procedures that have already been gathered or programmed. It promotes better research habits . It definitely provides '' procedural oversight ''. We would be highly suspect of results from authors that were unable or unwilling to produce their code/data. However, there are lots of problems that data/code availability requirements do no...

A lot of progress has been made on improving political scientists’ ability to access data ‘programmatically’, e.g. data can be downloaded with source code R. Packages such as WDI for World Bank Development Indicator and dvn for many data sets stored on the Dataverse Network make it much easier for political scientists to use this data as part of a highly integrated and reproducible workflow . There are nonetheless still many commonly used political science data sets that aren’t easily accessible to researchers. Recently, I’ve been using the Database of Political Institutions (DPI) , Polity IV democracy indicators, and Reinhart and Rogoff’s (2010) financial crisis occurrence data. All three of these data sets are freely available for download online. However, getting them, cleaning them up, and merging them together is kind of a pain. This is especially true for the Reinhart and Rogoff data, which is in 4 Excel files with over 70 individual shee...

This post by Mario Pineda-Krch complains about the woeful lack of reproducibility in computational sciences. This reminded me of Jake Bowers 's good piece in the Political Methodologist from earlier this year about how to do reproducible computational political science. The article actually inspired me to completely switch over all of my new writing to Sweave . Sweave allows you to combine your R code and LaTeX documents. If you make your Sweave document and data available to readers they can completely reproduce everything in your article: the models, the table, the graphs, everything.  RStudio makes using Sweave really easy (though I still use a text editor for writing much of the code since RStudio doesn't do spellcheck).  Political economy and political science journals don't seem to have been keeping up with these developments. In fact, poli sci journals often require MS Word documents and don't allow you to submit Sweave documents. Few journ...