Introduction

Welcome to GSLab!

This manual collects a set of procedures we have found productive in organizing research projects. They are designed to be general enough to be used by the core team in our lab, by teams in other labs we collaborate with, and by outside researchers. Material that is more specific to the core GSLab team at Stanford is presented in appendices.

The document Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner's Guide provides an overview of the underlying ideas and principles on which our approach is based. We recommend that everyone read it before reading the rest of this RA manual. We expect RAs to read it carefully and apply it faithfully.

There are three golden rules that form the bedrock of our approach

• Every issue must conclude with a reproducible deliverable
• Important commits must follow a complete run of the relevant build script
• All external dependencies must be robustly documented