st: re: What is the proper way of modifying user-created ado-files. . .

[Christopher Baum <Baum@bc.edu>]

<>
Tony says

Roy brings up an interesting point. How are contributions to SSC or  
user-written programs in general evaluated in academe? In my  
experience, these would need to be refereed by one's peers to count  
academically. On the other hand there are many extremely valuable  
contributions from Roy and others that are easily worth many articles  
that I see in the journals I read. Perhaps it is time to consider this  
in various academic contexts. I think outreg2, fracpoly, mim, etc. are  
easily worth publication points, but I'll bet they haven't counted for  
much unless the author or department chair has been able to convince  
some higher powers (e.g. 2^n) of their worth. Please let me be wrong  
on this.

It should be possible to get 'publication points' by describing one's  
work in a peer-reviewed article in the Stata Journal, all the more so  
that it is now listed in both Sci-Math and SSCI indices of Thomson. Of  
course, such an article is not just an expanded help file. I once  
wrote a seasonal unit root routine with Richard Sperling. Decent code,  
help file, examples, and set it aside. More recently Domenico Depalo  
wrote a very nice, academically respectable article about the theory  
of seasonal unit root testing, described the program he had written to  
perform those tests (which does what our hegy program does and more),  
and published it in SJ 9:3 (http://ideas.repec.org/a/tsj/stataj/v9y2009i3p422-438.html 
). It seems to me that such an article should receive as many  
'publication points' in most universities' evaluation processes as  
many papers that merely take existing software and exercise it to test  
a model -- particularly with SJ now in SSCI, which is a checklist item  
for many European institutions.

Kit

Kit Baum   |   Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin   |   http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming   |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata   |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html

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