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.

Tradition	Minimum documentation	Substitute when full sharing is impossible
Quantitative (public data)	master script, codebook, pinned versions, seeds	post code + derivation steps
Quantitative (restricted)	as above + an access path	synthetic data + application instructions
Comparative-historical	primary-source citations, archive locators	a source appendix readers can retrieve
Ethnographic / interview	coding scheme, within-case sampling logic	aggregated excerpts; controlled-access deposit (QDR)
Network / computational	boundary rules, tie definitions, missingness	anonymized edgelist + generation code

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