The TIER Documentation Protocol provides instructions for assembling a set of electronic files that document all the steps of data processing and analysis you conduct for an empirical research paper.

The documentation specified by the Protocol contains all the data, computer programs, and explanatory information an independent researcher would need to be able to replicate the data processing and analysis you conducted for the project and to reproduce exactly all the results reported in your paper.

The instructions presented in this repository are written for users of R. In a few places, they use R-specific terminology. For example, we refer to command files as scripts, and their names are followed by the .R extension. But the R-specific terminology that appears in these instructions can be easily translated to any of the major statistical packages (such as SPSS, SAS, Stata or Matlab) or other programming languages.

To get started you can fork and then clone this repository which will create a copy of the folder structure recommended in the Project TIER protocol.

Below we describe how to organize your analysis according to the Project TIER protocol, i.e. which components of your analysis should go into which folder.

Your repository should have the following hierarchy of files and folders:

• An electronic copy of your complete final paper
• The README.md file for your repository
• Original Data and Metadata - original-data-and-metadata
  • Original Data - original-data
  • Metadata - metadata
    • Metadata Guide - metadata_guide.md
    • Supplements - supplements Project TIER Framework Demo