Reproducible research in Stata: Managing dependencies and project files

Reproducibility of results is one of Stata's most valuable features, as well as an essential goal for researchers and journal editors. This ability, however, is limited by the lack of version control for user-submitted packages, which are often distributed through Github and other channels outside of the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive. Thus, other researchers or even coauthors might fail to reproduce a given result given the same code and data because of different package versions. In this talk, we present REQUIRE, a Stata package that fills this gap by ensuring that package dependencies are consistent across users. For this, REQUIRE is able to extract a package version number based on the "starbang lines" included by users at the top of each ado-file. Because starbangs are not standardized and come in many different variants, our package takes particular care to cover corner cases and have a coverage as broad as possible across all packages available on SSC and Github. Then, REQUIRE can be used to assert that an exact or minimum package version is present and install it if asked for. Last, we showcase how to use this package together with the related SETROOT package that tracks projects' working directories.