Exporting Analysis
This article discuss and give examples on three important concepts in relation to exporting results of analysis. Those three concepts are formatting of outputs, replicability and version control.
Read First
- Outputted research should always be reproducible. See categories below for different levels of replicability
- DIME does not have rules for which formatting rules you follow as long as the formatting is consistent in a project
Formatting
Formatting requirements depends a lot on who is the audience. For example, the best practice differs a lot if we are communicating results to the beneficiaries of the project or to the research community.
Fact sheets to government counterparts and to members of the communities that we are working with can be a very efficient method to disseminate our impact evaluation results. Here is a great example of a fact sheet used for a DIME project. Regression tables formatted according to journal standards would obviously not work well in this context.
For academic context then DIME has no formatting requirements other than to follow established guidelines as much as possible. Here are examples of such guidelines:
- American Economic Review style guide
- ShareLaTeX's collection of style guides
LaTeX
The best tool for excellent looking and reproducible formatting of tables is LaTeX. DIME has created a [LaTeX Training] with multiple stages targeting the absolute beginner as well as the experienced user.
Replicability
We all know that all our work should be replicable, especially the outputs, this section will walk you through different levels of replicability and tools for each of those levels.
DIME projects should at least have good replicability except in very special circumstances, but even then it should at least fulfill the requirements for Basic Replicability.
See more detailed definition of replicability by clicking the links above. The links above also list tools to achieve the different levels of replicability.
Version control
- GitHub
- Dated copy - but use main copy
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This article is part of the topic Data Analysis
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