Have an undergraduate student run it#
Tip
This is a great exercise for an undergraduate student, plus providing you with the benefit of testing your replication package.
TL;DR#
Ask an undergraduate student (with some experience using statistical software) to run your replication package, based entirely on the documentation you provide, without interacting with you in any other way.
Pay that undergraduate student!
Details#
The AEA Data Editor runs the reproducibility check with undergraduate students. While there is some training involved in order to do such an activity reliably and at scale, simply running the code should not involve much. Interested parties can consult the LDI Lab Training manual for some guidance on how to train students on this.
Takeaways#
What this does#
This verifies
that your code runs without problem, after all the debugging.
that your code runs without (too much) manual intervention.
that your code generates a log file that you can inspect, and that you could share with others (if you prepared that as per a previous section)
that it will run on somebody else’s computer!!
that it actually produces all the outputs
What this does not do#
Well, it’s not perfect, because sometimes undergraduates get things wrong. But that’s fine. It’s a teaching moment!
What to do next#
If you want to do something similar without the human touch, check out the next section.