Statistical software: its use and popularity in Economics

by Christina Kläre & Timo Borst

During a four weeks project at ZBW’s Department for Information Systems and Publishing Technologies, we collected some publicly available information about statistical software packages being used in research in Economics. This work is inspired by a constantly updated blog post from Robert A. Muenchen, who examined information sources like job announcements, scientific articles, reports from IT companies, questionnaires, sales statistics from software textbooks, blogposts, forums, polls measuring popularity of programming languages, sales and download figures, or the frequency of software releases from software vendors. By means of these sources, we conducted the following data collections. Read the rest of this entry »

New working paper: “Is Economics Research Replicable?”

Andrew Chang and Phillip Li, two researchers working at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency/U.S. Department of the Treasury, attempt to replicate 67 papers published in 13 well-regarded economics journals (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Review, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (P&P), Canadian Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Economic Journal, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Dynamics, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics), using author-provided replication files that include both data and code.

Some journals in the sample of Chang and Li require data and code replication files, and other journals do not require such files. Aside from 6 papers that use confidential data, they obtain data and code replication files for at least 29 of 35 papers (83%) that are required to provide such files as a condition of publication, compared to 11 of 26 papers (42%) that are not required to provide data and code replication files. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but not Practised

The two economists Patrick Andreoli-Versbach and Frank Mueller-Langer (both from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich) have published a new paper in Research Policy in which they analyse the data-sharing behaviour of 488 randomly selected empirical researchers.*

Andreoli-Versbach and Mueller-Langer (2014) provide evidence that most researchers in economics and management do not share their data voluntarily. The authors Read the rest of this entry »

Goettingen University: Project fosters Replication in Economics

There are many good reasons why we should replicate scientific findings. In his article “Open Access Economics Journals and the Market for Reproducible Economic Research“, the economist B.D. McCullough (2009) lists some of the reasons why replicable research is crucial for science:

„[…]replication ensures that the method used to produce the results is known. Whether the results are correct or not is another matter, but unless everyone knows how the results were produced, their correctness cannot be assessed. Replicable research is subject to the scientific principle of verification; non-replicable research cannot be verified. Second, and more importantly, replicable research speeds scientific progress. We are all familiar with Newton’s quote, ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ […] Third, researchers will have an incentive to avoid sloppiness. […] Fourth, the incidence of fraud will decrease.“ (p.118)

More recently, the case of the US-economists Rogoff and Reinhart clearly illustrated the need for replications to be much more common in science and scientific education. But… Read the rest of this entry »

Press release: Panel of experts recommends integration of research data management into universitie’s curricula

Experts say research data management should be an integral part of university curricula

Panel of experts recommends the integration of research data management into the university curricula of young researchers. The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the German Data Forum initiated a debate on the topic at the annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik, the most prestigious professional association of German-speaking economists, held in Düsseldorf from 4 to 7 September 2013. Read the rest of this entry »

Endorse the Open Economics Principles!

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the Open Economics Working Group has just finalised the Open Economic Principles. Now it is also possible to endorse these principles online.  In an e-mail the working group announces:

The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code. A year and a half ago the Open Economics project began with a mission of becoming central point of reference and support for those interested in open economic data. In the process of identifying examples and ongoing barriers for opening up data and code for the economics profession, we saw the need to present a statement on the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Replications & Data Availability matter: The Case of Rogoff and Reinhart

Chart by Reinhart/Rogoff

Yesterday several blogs, journals and news agencies spread the news: The US star economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart are in trouble, because a paper of them -which had and has a considerable influence on worldwide economic policy- contains at least one serious error.

Their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” was published in the flagship of economic research – the American Economic Review (AER) with also has a data availability policy that was evaluated in the course of our research project.
Important political assumptions and decisions were based on the research of Rogoff and Reinhart:  Olli Rehm, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission and also the US-Republican Paul Ryan argued with the findings of Rogoff and Reinhart to justify austerity economics. Read the rest of this entry »

Found on the ‘net: OpenAIRE, OA in Economics and Benefits of Open Data

Today I want to point the attention of our readers to some actual developments, articles and blog posts. Actually, there are too many interesting topics to be addressed in single posts. Therefore I collected some facts in a buildup.

Open AIRE releases demonstrators for enhanced publications

The OpenAIRE initiative (www.openaire.eu) has recently released demonstrators for enhanced publications. These focus on linking literature to associated research data and project information in two different disciplines: life sciences and social sciences.

The pilots are ‘work in progress’, but Open AIRE warmly welcomes feedback at this stage from researchers, open science enthusiasts, librarians and all on how the initiative can improve and develop these pilots further, especially from the researcher’s point of view.

The demonstrators are available here: https://www.openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/9-news-events/424-subject-specific-pilots-for-enhanced-publications

To get in touch with Open AIRE directly with any questions, feel free to write an Email to najla.rettberg [at] sub.uni-goettingen.de.

Ross Mounce: Review of Open Access in Economics

Ross Mounce, a PhD student at the University of Bath, wrote an interesting blog post about the development of open access publishing in economics. Ross states that 17% of the overall literature space (1.66 million articles) in 2011 were published open access. This is a comparatively good result. Nevertheless the remaining 83% of all articles are still published closed access. Read the rest of this entry »