After your Managing Editor accepts your paper (and before it is sent to final production) your paper will go through reproducibility checks. Therefore, when you submit all your materials for production, you are requested to submit, via Editorial Express, your final files for production, your online appendices, and your replication package. It is important that you carefully follow the instructions below to ensure that your paper and your replication package are not mishandled. This page provides you with detailed information that will help you preparing your replication package. Read it carefully before you submit!
You are requested to submit a single zip file with the following folder structure (please name your folders this way!):
For folders 1 and 2, please refer to the Econometrics Journal's Submission Guidelines and General Instructions to Authors and carefully follow the instructions indicated there. In the lines below, you will find specific guidelines about folder 3. If you were granted a data exemption at the time of first submission (see here, here, and here for details), and you are providing the replication team with temporary access to your data, you should send it to us outside of the main zip file.
Along with your package, but outside of the main zip file, you are requested to submit the following checklist completely filled and signed.
As indicated in the journal's Data and Code Availability Policy all packages should include the following information:
The ReadMe file should provide enough instructions so that all users (level of an advanced PhD student and above) can reproduce all the results in the paper in a reasonable amount of time and without problems. We strongly recommend using the following template. You may find in this web app a convenient tool to create your ReadMe file. The minimum required information includes:
All datasets used in the paper (with no exceptions) should be listed in the references section of the paper in the same way that we cite other papers, and a copy of these citations should appear in a dedicated section of the ReadMe file. You can find some examples in this document.
If the data used in the study is part of the replication package of another paper, both the paper and the replication package should be cited. Even commonly used datasets should be cited (in fact, funding of public and private institutions that make datasets available, even the most widely used ones, crucially depends on data citations!).
More specific guidance on data citations is available here.
There is a set of practices that are strongly recommended for all replication packages. The following list includes some of them (acknowledgedly, you are probably seeing some of them too late in the production process, but we strongly encourage you to take a good note for your future research!):
The Data Editors of the American Economic Association (Lars Vilhuber) the Review of Economic Studies (Miklós Koren), the Canadian Journal of Economics (Marie Connolly), and the Economic Journal and Econometrics Journal (Joan Llull) are coordinating reproduciblity requirements and guidelines across different journals. An example of this cooperation is this common guidance by Social Science Data Editors.
Submit your final files and replication package via Editorial Express. If size permits, submit all files into one zip file. If necessary, you can split your zip file into multiple smaller size files (for example using this).
If, even splitting zip files, the files are still too large for the Editorial Express platform, please arrange an alternative transfer method with the Data Editor at ectjdataeditor@gmail.com.
If you were granted a data exemption at the time of first submission (see here, here, and here for details), and you are allowed to provide the Data Editor and the replication team with temporary access to your restricted data for the sole purpose of the reproducibility checks, you should include the confidential data in a separate zip file.
The content of this additional zip file will be destroyed after the reproducibility checks are completed. All replicators and the Data Editor have signed confidentiality agreements that protect your submission.
If you can provide temporary access but not by sharing the data with the Data Editor (e.g., you can provide a member of the replication team with acccess to a remote server), please contact the Data Editor at ectjdataeditor@gmail.com to arrange the details of the alternative access method.
A few days after you submitted the package you will be contacted by the Data Editor with the outcome of the reproducibility checks, regardless of whether the checks were successful or there are modifications to be made. Please add ectjdataeditor@gmail.com to your safe contacts to avoid that the Data Editor's messages go to spam!
If you need to implement modifications of your package, you will be instructed to do so in the Data Editor's response. You will iterate with the Data Editor until the reproducibility checks are satisfactory concluded. In subsequent iterations, you will be requested to include a cover letter addressed to the Data Editor explaining how you addressed the different issues raised in the previous iteration. You should submit this separate cover letter outside of the main zip file.