Monday, February 22, 2010

Theory without code

As a demographer, I would not pay much attention to statistical methodological papers that do not describe how to implement their methodology either using existing software or using their own code. The reason is simple: I don't have the time and patience to gain a understanding of the methodology deep enough to be able to implement it myself; after all, it is the substantive research questions in demography that interest me most!

Open source statistical platform such as R, WinBUGS, and JAGS have made it so easy for statisticians to code their ideas into readily usable software, so the question is: why not?

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