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

[Maarten Buis <maartenlbuis@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 7:17 PM, Michael C. Morrison wrote:
> 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.

To answer your direct question, one way to find that is to look at
-ssc hot, author(author_name)-.

I don't think that popularity is necessarily an indicator of quality.
Other things you could look at is whether they made a certification
script publicly available, and if so, if they checked for the kind of
problems that are likely to occur in your type of data. You could also
run a simulation and thus check whether the program works as
advertised (and under what circumstances it breaks). The quality of
the programs on SSC is usually pretty good, but that does not mean I
would want to use them to run a nuclear power plant. So whether the
quality of the programs is good enough depends on what you want to do
with them

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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