Phillip Y. Lipscy writes:
Quick question about Appendix I:
Which of the following are you looking for?
1. Just the programs we used in R (this is my understanding from class)
2. "All the R code that you used to calculate the results you present"
#2 is not identical to #1. Per our discussion in class, my understanding is
that you don't want R code beyond the programs. If we gave you all the code we
used to get "any number you present," this is not much different from giving
you
a lot of raw output.
It should be. In an exercise like this, I end up trying dozens of
models and cleaning rules and exploratory data analysis. We do *not*
want to see all the stuff that your tried. We do want to see the code
that would allow us, starting with the unzipped ASCII data, to
"replicate" your results. Some of this code will do nothing but clean
the data. Even though it produces no output, we want to see it since
we need it to produce your output. Other code will actually calculate
the numbers that you present (and or be helper functions for doing
so). This sort code code (matching code, lm() code and so on) should
also be presented. We should be able to generate every number (mean
result and confidence interval from matching, regression coefficient,
and so on) that you present for ourselves. This is what replication
means.
Of course, this means that your code will need to be clear, clean and
(most important) well documented. A typical comment might be:
## Regression code used to produce the coefficients and standard
## errors in table 2. Note that the input dataframe is generated by
## running clean.data().
Also, I noticed from the midterms that several papers
contain additional
appendices for things that don't fit into the main article. Is this a good
place to dump a lot of extraneous stuff that doesn't fit into the
main body
No, it is not.
or
do you want us to stick to the 2 appendix limit?
We do. If something is not important enough to tell us about in the
body of the paper, then it isn't important enough to tell us about.
Good luck!
Dave
Thanks,
Phillip.
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Phillip Y. Lipscy
Perkins Hall Room #129
35 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617)493-4893
lipscy(a)fas.harvard.edu
First Year Student, Ph.D. Program
Harvard University, FAS, Department of Government
-------------------------------------------------
--
David Kane
Lecturer in Government
617-563-0122
dkane(a)latte.harvard.edu