About the Western Economic Association International

Sharing data and procedures at the publication stage enhances the value of the publication for authors and users. To encourage transparency and reproducibility in the research published in our two quarterly journals, Economic Inquiry and Contemporary Economic Policy, WEAI has partnered with openICPSR to provide published authors a central location to deposit data and other study materials allowing other researchers to replicate analyses without having to request any additional information from the author. Economic Inquiry mandates that published authors make their data and code available with the openICPSR or another community-recognized repository approved by the editor; Contemporary Economic Policy expects authors to do the same.

The repository automatically generates a citation when the data are “published” in openICPSR. In the final version of the article uploaded for publication, authors are required to include this citation in the reference section in addition to a Data Availability Statement conforming to one of these standard templates. All publications using or referring to these data will be expected to include a citation to them in their own bibliographies enabling authors to be credited, through citations, for the data that they create.

Deposits should include all data, annotated program code, command files, and documentation that is needed to replicate the findings from a published article without any additional support or information from the author(s). For complete instructions for what to include in your replication packet, visit WEAI Deposit Instructions.

If there are reasons that you would be unable to comply with this policy, those reasons should be explained when the paper is submitted. Waivers to this policy can be allowed when appropriate at the discretion of the journal editors.

For a discussion of best practice in preparing data for sharing, please refer to ICPSR’s Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving, 6th Edition.