To install ietoolkit, type ssc install ietoolkit in Stata. If you see anything mentioned here (in the master branch) that you do not see reflected in the commands in ietoolkit in Stata on your computer, then you might not have the latest version of ietoolkit installed. To update all files associated with ietoolkit type adoupdate ietoolkit, update in Stata. (It is wise to be in the habit of regularly checking if any of your .ado files installed in Stata need updates by typing adoupdate.)
Stata version 11 or later is required for this package of commands.
These commands are developed by people that work at or with the unit for Development Impact Evaluations (DIME) at the The World Bank. While the commands are developed with best practices for impact evaluations in mind, we still hope and think that these commands can be useful outside our field as well.
If you are familiar with GitHub go to the Contributions section below for advanced instructions.
An easy but still very efficient way to provide any feedback on these commands is to create an issue in GitHub. You can read issues submitted by other users or create a new issue in the top menu below worldbank/ietoolkit at https://github.com/worldbank/ietoolkit. While the word issue has a negative connotation outside GitHub, it can be used for any kind of feedback. If you have an idea for a new command, or a new feature on an existing command, creating an issue is a great tool for suggesting that. Please read already existing issues to check whether someone else has made the same suggestion or reported the same error before creating a new issue.
While we have a slight preference of receiving any kind of feedback here on GitHub, you are still very welcomed to send a regular email with your feedback to [email protected].
ietoolkit provides a set of commands that address different aspects of data management and data analysis in relation to Impact Evaluations. The list of commands will be extended continuously, and suggestions for new commands are greatly appreciated. Some of the commands are related to standardized best practices developed at DIME (The World Bank’s unit for Impact Evaluations). For these commands, the corresponding help files provide justifications for the standardized best practices applied.
- ietoolkit returns meta info on the version of ietoolkit installed. Can be used to ensure that the team uses the same version.
- ieduplicates and iecompdup are useful tools to identify and correct for duplicates, particulary in primary survey data
- iefolder sets up project folders and creates master do-files that links to all sub-folders
- iebaltab is a tool for multiple treatment arm balance tables
- iematch is an algortihm for matching observations in one group to "the most similar" observations in another group
- iegraph produces graphs of estimation results in common impact evaluation regression models
- ieboilstart standardizes the boilerplate code at the top of all do-files
- iedropone drops observations and controls that the correct number was dropped
- iegitaddmd adds placeholder README.md files to all empty subfolders allowing them to be synced on GitHub
- ieboilsave performs checks before saving a data set
If you are not familiar with GitHub see the Bug reports and feature requests section above for a less technical but still very helpful way to contribute to ietoolkit.
GitHub is a wonderful tool for collaboration on code. We appreciate contributions directly to the code and will of course give credit to anyone providing contributions that we merge to the master branch. If you have any questions on anything in this section, please do not hesitate to email [email protected]. See CONTRIBUTING.md for some more details on for example naming conventions.
The Stata files on the master branch are the files most recently released on the SSC server. README, LICENSE and similar files are updated directly to master in between releases. Check out any of the develop branches (if there are any) if you want to see what future updates we are currently working on.
Please make pull requests to the master branch only if you wish to contribute to README, LICENSE or similar meta data files. If you wish to make a contribution to any Stata file, then please do not use the master branch. If you wish to make a contribution to any Stata files that we have published at least once, then please fork from and make your pull request to the develop branch. The develop branch includes all minor edits we have made to already published commands since the last release that we will include in the next version released on the SSC server. If your addition is related to a specific issue in this repository, then see the naming convention in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
All Stata commands we are working on that we have yet to release a first version of, are found in the branches called develop-NAME where NAME corresponds to the working name of the command that is yet to be published. If you wish to contribute to any of those commands, then please fork from the branch of the command you want to contribute to, and only make edits to the .ado/.do and .sthlp that correspond to that command. If you want to make contributions to multiple commands that have yet to be released, then you will have to fork from and make pull request to multiple branches.
If you wish to make a contribution by making forks and pull requests but are not exactly sure how to do so, feel free to send an email to [email protected].
ietoolkit is developed under MIT license. See http://adampritchard.mit-license.org/ or see the LICENSE file for details.
Luiza Cardoso de Andrade ([email protected])
Kristoffer Bjärkefur, Mrijan Rimal, and Luiza Cardoso de Andrade.