The Software Behind the Stats: A Student Exploration of Software Trends Across Disciplines

The Software Behind the Stats: A Student Exploration of Software Trends Across Disciplines

Elizabeth Upton; Xizhen Cai; Pamela Jakiela; Owen Ozier; Shyam Raman
arXiv 2025
30
raman2025the

Abstract

This paper presents a student-led activity designed to explore the use of statistical software in academic research across economics, political science, and statistics. Students reviewed replication files from major journals and repositories, gaining hands-on experience with reproducible workflows while contributing to cross-disciplinary datasets. Web-scraped metadata and student data collection, together covering more than 10,000 papers, reveal clear disciplinary patterns: Stata remains dominant in economics, while R is increasingly popular in political science and is the standard in statistics. Within the social sciences, a growing number of articles also use multiple software platforms within a single manuscript. Students reported increased understanding of academic workflows and greater awareness of software diversity in quantitative research. The activity is easy to adapt across course levels and disciplines, and we offer suggestions for follow-up assignments that reinforce key concepts in reproducibility and data fluency. The resulting insights into current software practices are also valuable for instructors seeking to align their teaching with evolving trends in research.

Keywords

Citation

ID: 282508
Ref Key: raman2025the
Use this key to autocite in SciMatic or Thesis Manager

References

Blockchain Verification

Account:
NFT Contract Address:
0x95644003c57E6F55A65596E3D9Eac6813e3566dA
Article ID:
282508
Unique Identifier:
Network:
Scimatic Chain (ID: 481)
Loading...
Blockchain Readiness Checklist
Authors
Abstract
Journal Name
Year
Title
5/5
Creates 1,000,000 NFT tokens for this article
Token Features:
  • ERC-1155 Standard NFT
  • 1 Million Supply per Article
  • Transferable via MetaMask
  • Permanent Blockchain Record
Blockchain QR Code
Scan with Saymatik Web3.0 Wallet

Saymatik Web3.0 Wallet