Cool Data Alert: How to Link O*NET Occupation Data to CPS, Census, HRS

Péter Hudomiet shares his crosswalks on his research webpage. Thank you on behalf of all researchers!   

Occasional Reminder to Download and Memorize the Stata Cheat Sheets

Here they are. Download them. Laminate them. Keep a copy by your bedside, in the bathroom, on your treadmill, and of course on your desk. Enjoy!  

Choosing Coauthors

I think one of the most important determinants of success in academia is your ability to get good coauthors. Yes, some of this is endogenous. After all, the better your publications, the easier it will be for you to find good coauthors. But another part is a matter of finding coauthors that work well with you. 

Adam Grant tweeted about this recently and even provided a nice graphic that explains it perfectly. 

And if you find yourself working alone most of the time, consider this post a message urging you to take a chance on someone. Share an idea with a classmate. Email someone you met a conference last year. It is really hard to know whether you work well with a person until you actually try to write a paper together, but who knows. At worst, working on that one paper together will be awful, but at best, you find your professional soulmate! 

Stata Tip: How to Make Multiple Graphs Side by Side

 Yes, I know you know how to make graphs. Yes, you can make them one by one using copy-paste like crazy! If you're a bit fancier, you can use a foreach loop. But these techniques will produce separate graphs which you will then need to copy-paste (?) individually into your paper. If you were only going to make these graphs once and they would then be published, that's perfectly fine. Chances are though that you will make these graphs many many times. For this reason, it's best to invest in writing a few more lines in code to save you time in the future..but even more importantly, decrease the probability of making a mistake in the future. The more you automate, the lower the probability of making a mistake. 

Thank you, SDAS Techtips, for the tip. 

Click here for the code. 

How to make this: 

Instead of many of these: 

Choosing Topics to Work On

Adam Grant just tweeted some guidance on this. Great advice! But I would add one more thing: Always be working on something. Don't sit around doing nothing while you wait for the trifecta idea. Ideally, you have several different ideas and then among those, you can choose the one closest to the middle.