A famous British statistician has a very
entertaining talk in which he recounts his
attempts to replicate results of well-known papers at
the start of his career (1970s on). He repeatedly
had the experience that authors would not or
could not provide portable code for novel procedures.
They did not reply to requests for information, or
they sent unreadable code in hard-to-port Fortran,
or they confessed that the Figure in the paper
came from some research assistant/graduate
student in the basement who had subsequently left,
cracked up or disappeared -- or similar stories.
Nick
[email protected]
Richard Williams
> As a sidelight, I wonder how many esoteric techniques become popular
> partly because somebody writes a program for them, and how many good
> techniques fall by the wayside because nobody else can figure out how
> to estimate them? I've reviewed a few papers that employed
> user-written Stata routines. I always tell the authors that, if they
> want their work to have some impact, it would be a good idea to get
> their programs on SSC. I suspect that many people don't do so
> because of the hassle of generalizing the code, doing error-checking
> and writing a help file.
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