re: st: Responding to a Reviewer's Concern about an Ado

[Kit Baum <kitbaum@me.com>]

<>
A reviewer of a proposed publication of mine is questioning the use of a 
user-written program that I utilized in the analysis. I'm not sure if 
the reviewer is familiar with Stata and ados.

This particular ado is the primary tool utilized in a Sage publication 
regarding the subject at hand (which I will point out to the editor and 
through him to the reviewer.) I'm wondering, how does one find the 
number of downloads of the ado through ssc. I know there are other ways 
that users can obtain ados but I suspect ssc downloads would give me a 
decent number of people using the program. Any other ideas would be 
appreciated. In advance. Thanks.


In addition to the good comments made by Nick, Maarten and Joerg, I would add one more. The fact that this user-written
ado is on SSC means that anyone, including the reviewer, is free to view the source code. That is more than can be said
of using a commercial package where the code is a 'black box'. Stata is a commercial package, but a sizable fraction of
official code is viewable. Most all SSC routines have code that can be scrutinized. In this regard, I would think that user-
written routines in Stata, R or MATLAB should not be deprecated as amateur efforts, as what the programmers have implemented
is open for all to see.

Kit Baum
kitbaum@me.com



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