A tiny appetizer for using Git/GitHub in social science research

What is Git?

Git is a revision control system
allows you to track changes to any text-based files (e.g., R code, Stata code, LaTeX documents, raw text files, CSV files, etc.)
being a distributed system, it encourages collaboration on software projects
typically used for software development and other version control tasks
created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 (yes, THE Linus Torvalds!)
typically used from the command line

web service "on top of Git" that allows you to host Git repositories
offers functionality of Git as well as other features
as of April 2016, more than 14 million users and more than 35 million repositories --> largest host of source code in the world
browser functionality with social-networking-like features
desktop client for all platforms, which facilitates using Git a lot
if you host your repositories publicly, it's free
if you want to host (parts of) them privately, you have to pay for it (unless you're a student); see https://github.com/pricing
you can simply use the service as an online repository for your code
you can follow other code projects ("fork" them), e.g., packages, to monitor but also suggest changes
you can file issues to other projects ("Function x of your package does not work for me, is there a bug?", "I have a suggestion of how to improve your package")

easy way to publish code/appendices/additional results, independent of a publisher
present work in progress before article is published
make your research reproducible; this ideally means that you publish the entire project, including original data and all the code (both cleaning and analysis code)
do better version control, no longer analysis_survey_final_revised.R or keep old files an a designated folder
retain full control over the availability of your data
host your own website
indirectly by using latest versions of statistical software---much of the interesting work in the R community is published on GitHub even before packages get finally published on CRAN

A tiny appetizer for using GitHub in social science research