Re: st: RE: Finding Stata commands

[Tim <lists@timbp.com>]

out why. So here's a summary.
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.

I don't expect Stata or Statalist to give me the best analysis for my 
problem. But if I decide I want to do (for example) propensity 
weighting, I would hope -findit-  would give appropriate results. And I 
still wonder why I have never heard of -psmatch2- when (according to 
Statalist) most Stata users interested in propensity matching would look 
for -psmatch2-.

On 4/10/2010 21:57, Nick Cox wrote:
> As Tim implies, there is an easy and a difficult side to this.
>
> -findit- remains the best single way of finding Stata commands.
>
> . findit propensity score
>
> does point to -psmatch2-, among other materials.
>
> However, this process is dependent on official Stata commands and user-written packages being documented properly, notably by people having previously thought of the keywords you want to type. Sometimes, as in this example, they are fairly obvious, but not always.
>
> Anyone who wants to know what is "best" can only expect only limited help.
>
> 1. StataCorp feels free to say which official Stata commands are best for a given purpose (often by downgrading outdated commands in terms of documentation support). They won't grade or evaluate user-written commands, other than by adopting them (which these days is rare).
>
> 2. User-programmers should feel free to say which of their own commands are best for a given purpose.
>
> 3. You can otherwise best get a sense of what is "best" by following Statalist and listening to what people say -- or do not say. Look for programs that are well supported, well documented and well maintained. Sometimes, a programmer did a good job some years ago and there is no need to update, but often an old, unsupported program may be suspect.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Tim
>
> I have never used propensity score matching but I considered it recently
> and did some reading in the area, and this post attracted my attention.
> I have not been following this discussion, but I happened to notice the
> claim that "most users these days would look for -psmatch2-".
>
> So my question: why would most users look for -psmatch2-?
> Why would anyone look for that name if they did not already know it?
>
> I typed -findit propensity score- and got a lot of results that look
> useful. The first few mention -gpscore- (I have not followed links to
> know if this is relevant) and  -pscore- is mentioned near the end.
>
> In scanning the search results I saw no mention of -psmatch2-. Yet "most
> users...would look for psmatch2".
>
> When I think about it, I realise all the Stata commands I use are those
> that were mentioned in my training.
> If I seriously wanted to do propensity score matching in Stata, how
> would I find the correct command?
> (and how do I know that -psmatch2- is the correct command?)
> More generally, how do I find the best command for an analysis I am
> considering but have never used?
>
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/