Ajs Data And Transparency

Data & Transparency (ajs-data-and-transparency)

AJS's public author guidance is less prescriptive on mandatory replication than APSR or AJPS: there is no advertised editor-verified reproducibility deposit comparable to a Dataverse verification step. Do not assert a requirement that AJS does not state. The right posture is: document thoroughly, share what you ethically can, protect informants, and confirm the current supplementary-materials / data-availability policy on the live AJS pages before submission.

When to trigger

• Preparing data documentation and any supplementary materials
• Deciding what can be shared given confidentiality, IRB, or proprietary constraints
• Documenting comparative-historical or ethnographic evidence so claims are checkable
• A reader asked how others could verify or build on the analysis

What AJS does / does not require (verify current wording)

• No advertised mandatory, editor-verified replication package. Treat reproducibility as good practice you choose, not a stated gate; live-check current data-availability or supplementary policy before submission.
• Originality / overlap: if the paper overlaps your prior published or under-review work, prepare a brief originality statement saying what is new here.
• Ethics: concurrent submission to more than one journal violates the Press's ethical standards and leads to rejection.

Good practice (do this even though AJS may not pre-verify)

• Document provenance and construction. A README/codebook describing sources, sample construction, variable definitions, and analysis steps so the work is checkable.
• Quantitative: keep a master script + pinned versions + seeds; be ready to share code even when restricted data cannot be redistributed (give an access path).
• Comparative-historical: cite primary sources precisely enough that the evidentiary trail can be followed.
• Ethnographic / interview: protect informants — anonymize, aggregate, or restrict sensitive material; a controlled-access repository (e.g., QDR) where appropriate; share what supports the claims without exposing participants.
• Confidentiality first. Human-subjects protection overrides sharing; state clearly when and why data cannot be shared, and what can (synthetic data, code, documentation).

Transparency posture by tradition (an AJS decision table)

AJS is method-pluralist, so "transparency" means a checkable evidentiary trail proportionate to the claim, not a one-size deposit. Confirm current policy wording against the journal's current submission guidelines.

Calibration (where AJS sits, hedged)

AJS's craftsmanship culture means referees value a documentation trail that lets a skeptical reader follow the inference — even though AJS does not advertise an editor-verified replication gate the way some political-science journals do. Unlike a parsimony-first sibling that may lean on one mandatory deposit, at AJS the depth and checkability of the tradition-appropriate trail carry the day; treat thorough documentation as a craft choice, and confirm the live data-availability policy before submission.

Illustrative: a welfare-state study draws on three archives plus a restricted panel that cannot be redistributed. Applying the table, the author posts the script and codebook, adds a source appendix with exact archive locators (an illustrative ~140 primary sources), and supplies a synthetic panel plus data-access steps — documentation chosen to make the inference checkable, not overstated as an AJS-verified deposit.

Anti-patterns

• Over-stating AJS policy as a mandatory verified replication deposit (it does not advertise one)
• Promising open data that IRB / confidentiality will not allow
• No codebook or documentation, making the analysis uncheckable
• Exposing identifiable information about ethnographic informants
• Submitting elsewhere while under AJS review (violates the Press's ethical standards)
• Treating transparency as one fixed deposit rather than a tradition-appropriate evidentiary trail

Output format

【Sharing posture】what can be shared (data / code / docs / synthetic) and what cannot, and why
【Documentation】README/codebook + provenance + (quant) seeds/pinned versions? [Y/N]
【Confidentiality】informant/participant protection handled? [Y/N]
【Originality statement】prepared if overlap with prior work? [Y/N/NA]
【Policy check】current AJS data/supplementary policy confirmed on live page? [Y/N/live-check needed]
【Next】ajs-review-process

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — reproducibility tooling and controlled-access options (QDR)
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — AJS ethics / originality and the live-check boundary for data policy

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → American-Journal-of-Sociology-Skills/skills/ajs-data-and-transparency/SKILL.md