EFFECTIVE January 1, 2022
To promote consistent standards and requirements among general-interest journals in the field of economics, the International Economic Review has adopted the AER data availability policy. We are grateful to the editors of the American Economic Review for constructing this policy.
Data Availability Policy
It is the policy of the IER to publish papers only if the data used in the analysis are clearly and precisely documented and are readily available to any researcher for purposes of replication. Authors of accepted papers that contain empirical work, simulations, or experimental work must provide to the Review, prior to publication, the data, programs, and other details of the computations sufficient to permit replication. Starting January 1, 2022, at the time of first submission, authors have to acknowledge the following statement (by clicking an appropriate box on the submission website):
- Mandates Data Sharing
International Economic Review requires, as a condition for publication, that the data supporting the results in the paper will be archived in an appropriate public repository. If a paper is accepted for publication in IER, authors are required to provide a data availability statement, including a link to the repository they have used, and to cite the data they have shared. Whenever possible the scripts and other artifacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper should also be publicly archived. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, for example, if sharing data compromises privacy of human data, ethical standards, or legal requirements. Exceptions must be requested on initial submission. If authors are unable to share data (for example, if sharing data compromises ethical standards or legal requirements) then authors are not required to share it and must describe restrictions in their data availability statement.
The Editor should be notified at the time of submission if the data used in a paper are proprietary or if, for some other reason, the requirements above cannot be met. After conditional acceptance of an article, the authors are expected to deposit their data, programs, and sufficient details to permit replication, in electronic form, at one of the standard data repositories the conditional acceptance letter will provide, and include, in the final version of the paper, a data availability statement, including a link to the repository they have used.
Our policies differ somewhat for econometric and simulation papers, and for experimental papers.
For econometric and simulation papers, the minimum requirement should include the data set(s) and programs used to run the final models, plus a description of how previous intermediate data sets and programs were employed to create the final data set(s). Authors are invited to submit these intermediate data files and programs as an option. If they are not provided, authors must fully cooperate with investigators seeking to conduct a replication. The data files and programs can be provided in any format using any statistical package or software, however, a Readme PDF file documenting the purpose and format of each file provided, and instructing a user on how replication can be conducted, should also be provided.
A request for an exemption from this requirement, based on proprietary data, may be approved by the Editor, but in that event authors must still provide a copy of the programs used to create the final results, as well as whatever data is not subject to proprietary exclusion. The criterion for exemption from the data availability policy is that other investigators can, in principle, obtain the data independently. These authors must provide in their Readme PDF file details of how the proprietary data can be obtained by others.
For experimental papers we have a more detailed policy, including requirements for submitted papers, as well as accepted papers. We normally expect authors of experimental articles to supply the following supplementary materials (any exceptions to this policy should be requested at the time of submission):
1. The original instructions. These should be summarized as part of the discussion of experimental design in the submitted manuscript and also provided in full, as an appendix at the time of submission. The instructions should be presented in a way that, together with the design summary, conveys the protocol clearly enough that the design could be replicated by a reasonably skilled experimentalist. For example, if different instructions were used for different sessions, the correspondence should be indicated.
2. Information about subject eligibility or selection, such as exclusions based on past participation in experiments, college major, etc. This should be summarized as part of the discussion of experimental design in the submitted manuscript.
3. Any computer programs, configuration files, or scripts used to run the experiment and/or to analyze the data. These should be summarized, as appropriate in the submitted manuscript, and provided in full as an appendix when the final version of a manuscript is sent in. (Data summaries, intermediate results, and advice about how to use the programs are welcome, but not required.)
4. The raw data from the experiment. These should be summarized as appropriate in the submitted manuscript and provided in full as an appendix when the final version of an accepted manuscript is sent in; with sufficient explanation to make it possible to use the submitted computer programs to replicate the data analysis.
Other information, such as applications to Institutional Review Boards, consent forms, or Web signup and disclosure forms, is not required or expected. If desired to make this kind of information public, it should be posted on the laboratory’ or authors' Web sites.