Audit Data References

SkillFiles & storage

Scans notebooks for data file references and verifies each file exists on disk. Use when checking for broken data paths.

Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Audit Data References skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by brycewang-stanford/auto-empirical-research-skills in skills/29-quarcs-lab-project20XXy/dot-claude/skills/data-audit/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Scan all notebooks for data file references and verify they exist on disk.

Steps

  1. Scan all .ipynb files in notebooks/ for data loading patterns:

    • Python: pd.read_csv(...), pd.read_stata(...), pd.read_excel(...), pd.read_parquet(...), open(...), np.loadtxt(...)
    • R: read.csv(...), read_csv(...), read.dta(...), haven::read_dta(...), readxl::read_excel(...), load(...)
    • Stata: use "...", import delimited "...", import excel "...", insheet using "..."
    • Also check the .md Jupytext pairs for the same patterns
  2. Extract every referenced file path and normalize it:

    • Resolve relative paths from the notebook's directory (notebooks/)
    • Resolve paths using DATA_DIR, RAW_DATA_DIR from config.py / config.R
  3. Check that each referenced file exists in data/rawData/ or data/

  4. Scan data/rawData/ and data/ for all data files present on disk

  5. Report three categories:

    Resolved — referenced and found:

    • File path, which notebook references it, line/cell number

    Broken — referenced but not found:

    • File path as written in code, which notebook, suggested fix (closest matching file, or note that it may need to be downloaded)

    Undocumented — on disk but never referenced by any notebook:

    • File path in data/rawData/ or data/ that no notebook loads
  6. Print a summary: total references, resolved, broken, undocumented files

Error handling

  • If no notebooks exist, report "No notebooks found" and stop.
  • If data/rawData/ does not exist, warn but continue checking data/.

Signals

GitHub stars
4k
Forks
531
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Item type
skill
Key
data-audit
Source
github.com/brycewang-stanford/auto-empirical-research-skills