We are both right here.
-search- without options searches for keywords in a
specific sense as explained in the documentation.
-findit- or -search, all- adds an extra search of
the internet, or strictly of a database produced
daily by a search conducted by StataCorp software.
You are totally correct that the visibility of
user-written software depends on the words
employed by Stata user-programmers to describe
their programs.
Nick
[email protected]
Dupont, William
> Nick
>
> I am a little confused as to who can and should do what. Perhaps I am
> using "keyword" incorrectly. However, it is currently possible to use
> -findit- to find user-written programs that have not been published in
> STB or SJ by searching for "keywords". In fact, brief experimentation
> suggests that -findit- can find any phrase that is given in a
> program's
> help file.
>
> For example I submitted a program to calculate restricted
> cubic splines
> to the RePEc data base. To date, this program has not been
> described in
> either STB or SJ. However,
> -findit cubic splines- finds the program without difficulty. My help
> file contains the phrase -implicitly specifies k knots
> located at xvar-
> . The command
>
> -findit implicitly specifies k knots located at xvar-
>
> immediately finds this program. Hence, I infer that as long
> as authors
> put appropriate keywords or phrases in their help file, users will be
> able to find their programs using -findit-.
>
> Incidentally, Ronna Cong does not mention conditional logistic
> regression in her help file. She does mention "Delta-Beta influence
> statistics" and -findit- finds her program using this phrase.
>
> I guess what I should have said was to urge all authors who contribute
> programs to the Stata community to include lots of helpful
> keywords and
> phrases in their documentation. If I am correct that
> -findit- searches
> all contributed help files for matches, then this fact is of value for
> the Stata community to know.
Nick Cox
> The Statalist FAQ advises that
>
> "User-written programs accessible from the StataCorp web site have
> essentially the same status as those published on Statalist. Their
> posting there is basically a matter of convenience to users and is not
> an official endorsement by StataCorp."
>
> Strictly speaking, I believe that this applies even to those programs
> that happen to have been written by people who were at the time of
> publication employees of StataCorp, in this case Ronna Cong.
>
> As a consequence, programs such as -clfit- on
> http://www.stata.com/users/ are not represented by any
> keywords at all,
> in so far as they are not included in entries in the *.key files,
> explained in the help for -keyfiles-, which are what -search- [narrow
> sense] examines.
>
> Only if you use -findit- or -search, all- will you find
> -clfit-, but not
> because of its keywords, but because of write-ups at that website that
> are detected by an internet search.
>
> This is not to disagree with Bill on
> the merits of -clfit-. But it is clear that there is no way that
> user-written programs, other than those published via the STB
> or SJ, can
> systematically and practically be included in the .key files.
>
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
