Best Practices Manual README

This is a manual of best practices in research transparency, written by Garret Christensen at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. Our intention is to write and maintain a guide or reference volume of best practices for transparent quantitative social science reseach, updating it as new tools and resources become available.

To access the manual, click the above link for the Manual.pdf file shown in the GitHub repository, and click the 'Download' button. When citing the manual, please include the date from the front page, which serves to differentiate between updates.

We encourage feedback from the research community (hence its placement on GitHub). Please send suggestions to garret@berkeley.edu. Those with an interest in substantive contributions are encouraged to submit pull requests (see help here or learn the basics of version control from Software Carpentry). The manual is written in LaTeX, so changes to the main body of the document should be made to Manual.tex, and additions to the references file should be made to Bibliography.bib. (These files can be edited in any text editor, but we suggest MikTex and JabRef for Windows and MacTeX and BibDesk for Mac users.)

A slide deck summarizing some of the major points addressed in the Manual is available in this GitHub repository.

Major Version Notes:

1. Draft first uploaded by Garret Christensen on GitHub for collaborative editing 2014.11.6 Original Word doc formatted in Markdown using pandoc.

2. 2014.11.18 Changed to LaTeX because Markdown simply isn't designed for 50-page documents. The section headings alone were killing me. If we use github to sync the files offline, I think we/anyone should easily be able to compile the document.

3. 2014.12.11 Version presented at BITSS Annual Meeting.

4. 2015.4.16 and 2015.4.28 Presented to CEGA Staff and Professor Edward Miguel's graduate course on social science research transparency (Econ 270D).

5. 2015.6 and 2015.7 Presented to BITSS Summer Institute, added suggestions from 270D course and Summer Institute.

6. 2016.11 Shorter version submitted to Journal of Economic Methodology. (See "pub" branch.)

7. 2018.04 Table 1 updated with current registrations totals, a few links fixed, submitted to the Economics E-Journal.