Journal editor: It is up to the author to release their data

I received this email from a journal editor in political science after I asked about their replication policy. My original email is below.

Currently swamped – but I’m sending my data soon

Nicole,

I would be more than happy to share my data with you, but I am currently swamped and have not had time to clean up the dataset that you requested. Normally, this wouldn’t take much but was originally part of a larger dataset that I had created, and that dataset includes data from other authors which did not give me permission to share (Don’t worry – this data is nothing used in the article). It will likely be a few weeks before I can get to this. Will this be too late?

Out of curiously, what type of project are you working on that you would need the dataset? (…)

Best,
______________

I sent two follow-up emails. The author never replied again.

Fast and detailed answer from original author

A while ago, I tried to replicate tables from a textbook on panel data analysis to learn more about fixed effects, random effects and hybrid models. While code and files for the book were available on a webpage for the book, I still had some questions. I received a detailed reply only three days after I wrote to one of the authors.

“Travelling”

Hi Nicole,

(…) I only have some of my electronic files with me during this trip, and the material from _____ is not, unfortunately, among them. I don’t have a ready-made set of do files and datasets for __________ although I would be happy to collect these for you once I have access to the files. (…)

All the best,
_________

Note: This was at least a year ago. I received some files, and excellent help explaining the codings in the data. But I never received the specific data I had asked for to replicate all tables (including the most interesting ones).

 

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Replication correspondence: “Let me see what I can dig up”

Nicole,

(…) I will definitely send a .dta file when I can clean it up a bit. I am less sure I can track down the .do files, but let me see what I can dig up. (…)

Best,
___________

 

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“Just outsheeted the Stata file to a csv”

I could not open a data set with the outdated STATA version on my university computers. I received this helpful email:

Hi Nicole,

(…) I’m happy to help – I just outsheeted the Stata file to a csv file. I hope this works for you. (…) Let me know if this doesn’t work.

Best,
_________

 

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“My doctoral institution bought the data”

Nicole,

(…) The ____ dataset I am afraid I can’t give you, because my doctoral institution bought it and it is proprietary. (…)

Best,
___________

 

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“Can’t make data available because of contractual agreement”

Dear Nicole,

(…) We can’t make our ____ data available because of our contractual agreement with ___. (…)

Best wishes,

________

 

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“I just quickly ran the ordered probit” for you

I could not replicate all results from a paper (replication data were made available online), and asked the author for advice. This is the reply:

“Don’t have R code available”

Hi Nicole –

Thanks for the note. Unfortunately, we did this in AmeliaView, so we don’t have R code available. (…)

Best,
_________

 

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