Contributing

Thanks for your interest in this teaching hub. It is intentionally a small, maintainer-driven project — Eric Weisbrod (University of Kansas) owns the materials and is the single steward. That said, outside contributions are welcome and several kinds are particularly useful:

  • Typo fixes, broken links, clarifications in any of the READMEs, the AGENTS.md files, or the JOSE paper.
  • Bug reports for the pipeline scripts in project-template (download, transform, figures, analyze, provenance) or the LaTeX template in overleaf-template.
  • Suggestions for new advanced-topic briefings, additional templates, or improvements to the pedagogical sequence.

Where to file

The teaching materials live across three repositories. File contributions and issues in the repo whose content is actually affected:

Topic Repo
Anything in the hub README, AGENTS.md, JOSE paper, or sas-example/ example-project
Pipeline scripts (R / Python / Stata), utils.{R,py}, run-all.{R,py}, project_setup, batch_run project-template
LaTeX paper template, main.tex, Bibliography.bib overleaf-template

If you’re not sure which repo applies, file in example-project and it can be moved.

Reporting issues

  1. Search the repo’s existing issues first to avoid duplicates.
  2. Open a new issue describing:
    • What you ran. Which script, which language combo, which section of the LaTeX template.
    • What happened. Paste the relevant error message, or the last 20 lines of the relevant log file (log/<script>.Rout, log/<script>.log, etc.).
    • What you expected to happen.
    • Your environment. OS, R version, Python version (via uv --version if relevant), Stata version, and which language combination was selected at project_setup().

For bugs that depend on WRDS data, you don’t need to share data — just describe which table you were pulling and which filter you applied.

Suggesting changes (pull requests)

  1. Fork the affected repo on GitHub.
  2. Create a feature branch off main: git checkout -b fix/short-description
  3. Make your changes. For code: keep style consistent with the surrounding file (roxygen2 / Google-style docstrings; native pipe |> in R; polars in Python; the conventions are documented in each repo’s AGENTS.md).
  4. If your change touches the pipeline, run the affected step end-to-end on your own data and confirm the resulting log file looks reasonable.
  5. Push the branch and open a pull request against main. Describe the motivation and any open questions in the PR body.

PRs that add value but don’t fit the maintainer’s current direction may be declined or asked to remain as forks. That isn’t a comment on the quality of the work — it’s a maintainability constraint for a single-person project.

Seeking support

Three channels, in order of preference:

  1. A GitHub issue on the relevant repo. Public, searchable, helps the next person who hits the same problem.
  2. GitHub Discussions on example-project for open-ended questions (workflow, course-design feedback, how-do-I-do-X-with- this-template) where the answer isn’t a bug fix.
  3. Email to the maintainer for anything that can’t be discussed in public. The address is on the maintainer’s KU Business School profile.

The maintainer is a full-time faculty member — response times will vary, especially during teaching semesters.

A note on AI-assisted contributions

These materials are themselves built using generative AI tools as part of the workflow (see the AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files in each repo), and PRs developed with the help of AI are welcome. Two expectations:

  • You are responsible for the content of your PR, whether or not AI assisted in producing it. This includes catching hallucinated function names, made-up citation keys, and incorrect facts. Use of AI is not an excuse for errors.
  • Never include a bibliography citation you have not personally verified. AI-generated citation keys frequently point at papers that do not exist or have garbled metadata; check the bib file before submitting.

Code of conduct

Be respectful, assume good faith, and keep discussion focused on the work. Harassment, derogatory language, or off-topic personal attacks will result in the issue being closed or the offender being blocked. This is a public-facing project for the academic community; the standard expected is that of a journal review process.