As a public health statistician, I am very grateful to all researchers who publish code. More so for those who publish packages that make their techniques easy

As a public health statistician, I am very grateful to all researchers who publish code. More so for those who publish packages that make their techniques easy to use. I am not an expert in the field of statistics, just a grunt applying what you guys devise. It takes a while for me to do enough research and testing to be sure I'm correctly implementing new techniques. Even a basic pseudo-code walkthrough would immensely help. >My code documents wouldn't be helpful since the data is all locked up due to HIPAA concerns. We're talking names, health conditions, scrambled SSN, this isn't reproducible because the data is locked to those without security clearance. Is there a standard format for this kind of data? If so, consider using it. That way, others can easily create artificial datasets to test it. Even if you have no control over your data source, you can convert the raw data to the standard as a "pre-munging" step. >So, really, my field of public health doesn't use GitHub or sharing much, there's simply too little benefit to the researcher to share their code. Sad but true.