The Software Behind the Stats: A Student Exploration of Software Trends in Economics, Political Science, and Statistics
Published in Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 2026
Abstract
This paper presents a student activity designed to explore the use of software and reproducibility practices in academic research across selected journals in economics, political science, and statistics. The activity was designed to deepen students’ understanding of reproducible research workflows and increase their awareness of disciplinary norms in quantitative scholarship. Students reviewed reproduction files associated with published articles from major journals and repositories, using a survey to document software use. Combined with web-scraped metadata, the resulting dataset spans more than 10,000 papers and reveals clear patterns within the journals examined: Stata remains dominant in economics, R is increasingly common in political science, and R is the standard in statistics, with a growing number of articles using multiple software platforms within a single manuscript. These results provide educators with a data-driven view of software practices in contemporary quantitative research, helping to inform decisions about which tools to emphasize in the classroom. To assess whether the student activity met its pedagogical goals, we summarize student feedback, which indicates increased understanding of academic workflows and greater awareness of software diversity. We provide all instructional materials, data, and code to support adoption across course levels and disciplines, and conclude with suggestions for follow-up assignments.
Other versions
Earlier version appears as Stat arXiv 2504.06507
Data
Data and analysis files: (hosted at OSF)
Other details
Recommended citation: Upton, Elizabeth, Xizhen Cai, Pamela Jakiela, Owen Ozier, and Shyam Raman. 2026. "The Software Behind the Stats: A Student Exploration of Software Trends in Economics, Political Science, and Statistics." Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, August, 1–19. doi:10.1080/26939169.2026.2725967.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2026.2725967