Why "search synth" does not return information about "synth" command?

[River Huang]

Dear All,

I'd like to know which files are installed by type "ssc install synth".

I used to do this by first typing "search synth" and then finding the corresponding "synth" package. By clicking the link, I can count the files.

However, I just found that it did not return any link to the "synth" package.

Any suggestions. Thanks.

[Nick Cox]

Good question. Perhaps it is because "synth" is not itself a keyword in the information shown by

ssc desc synth

[Jared Greathouse]

Synth gives you the smoking dataset Abadie, Alex Diamond, and Hainmuller use in their 2010 Journal of the American Statistical Association paper. It also installs a plugin in C for the nested minimizer synth usually relies on.

[River Huang]

Dear Nick, Thanks. The "search synth" command used to work but it does not work now.

[River Huang]

Dear Jared, Thanks for the information. I just wondered why the "search synth" command did not show the "synth" package.

[Chen Samulsion]

Professor Huang, I guess it's a network problem, I encounter this situation often in these days that Stata return nothing when type search pkgname.
Here is an example: I can install successfully by using ssc install stdtable, however Stata returns nothing when I type

search stdtable

And Stata return a lot of community-contributed packages but no stdtable even it has standardize as its keywords if I type

search standardize

[Chen Samulsion]

And as to -synth- I can also replicate your problem. When I type search synth, Stata return 13 packages but do not include synth itself, but I can get result from using

ssc describe synth

[River Huang]

Dear Chen, Thanks a lot for sharing your experience. I visited one of the authors's website (Welcome to the Webpage of Jens Hainmueller (stanford.edu)) and find a way out.

net from "https://web.stanford.edu/~jhain/Synth"
net install synth, all replace force

[Jared Greathouse]

River Huang out of curiosity, why you want to use SCM?

[River Huang]

Dear Jared, In fact, I asked this question for my son, who is a Ph.D. student at National Taiwan University. He works as a research assistant and needs to run "synth" command on a confidential network (you can't just type ssc install synth to install the files. You have to BRING them with you, and the staff there will install those for you). Recently, I published a small paper (to examine the effect of open code/data policy on journals' impact factor) using the synthetic DID approach (Stata sdid command).