Stata Press is pleased to announce the release of Data Management Using Stata: A Practical Handbook, Second Edition by Michael N. Mitchell.
Whether you are a new user needing to import, clean, and prepare data for your first analysis in Stata or you are an experienced user hoping to learn new tricks for the most challenging tasks, this book is for you. You can jump straight to the section of the book that discusses the particular challenge you are facing. There you will find a clear explanation of how to approach the problem and illustrative examples to guide you. Read more…
Categories: New Books, Resources, Stata Products Tags: books, data management, forthcoming, handbook, michael mitchell, mitchell, release, reproducibility, Stata 16, stata press, unicode
I care about reproducible research. Anyone who has ever been a research assistant or tried to follow the path set by other researchers also cares. Sometimes, reproducing others’ results is a frustrating task; sometimes, it is outright impossible. Yet sometimes, it is satisfyingly simple. In my experience, reproducing results is easy when it involves a Stata do-file. I believe this is true even beyond my personal bias (I work for Stata and used the software regularly before that). A recent article published by the American Economic Association (AEA), Vilhuber, Turrito, and Welch (2020), shows that Stata is the preferred package among economists, and I believe reproducibility is a big reason why. Read more…
I saw a tweet the other day where someone claimed that StataCorp ensures that the dataset format in Stata X is always different from Stata X-1.
This reminded me of an email I wrote a few years ago to a user who had questions about backward compatibility and reproducibility. I’m going to use large parts of that email in this blog post to share my thoughts on those topics.
I understand the frustration of incompatibilities between software versions. While it may not ease the inevitable difficulties that arise, I would like to explain our efforts in this regard. Read more…