Re: st: RE: Finding Stata commands

[Maarten buis <maartenbuis@yahoo.co.uk>]

--- Tim wrote
> But if I decide I want to do (for example) propensity 
> weighting, I would hope -findit-  would give appropriate results.

-findit- does no magic, it just looks at keywords that were provided
by the authors of the programs (what else can it do?). One difficulty 
is that it is hard to know what search words are appropriate when you 
start looking into a new technique. Another problem is that the 
appropriate keywords differ across disciplines, and there is no 
guarantee that someone who wrote the appropriate commands is familiar 
with the keywords used in your discipline.

However, none of these problems are new. When you do a literature 
search in your library on a new topic you encounter the same problems. 
So I suggest you use the same strategies to solve it. 

> Monitoring Statalist is great for learning what is available (both in 
> terms of techniques and in Stata commands). But this is a very active 
> list and I only read posts where the title relates to something I am 
> working on. I would search the archives if I were trying a new type of 
> analysis. But I would not have searched for -psmatch2- and I dispute 
> that "most users" would have.

You can search the archives on propensity score matching, which does 
turn up several entries on -psmatch2-. Once you found that, you can
research that command in more detail and see if it is appropriate for
you. Just like a library search, this is a sequential proces.

Hope this helps,
Maarten

--------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Institut fuer Soziologie
Universitaet Tuebingen
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tuebingen
Germany

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------


      

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