Archiving Software Surrogates on the Web for Future Reference

Abstract

Abstract. Software has long been established as an essential aspect of the scientific process in mathematics and other disciplines. However, reliably referencing software in scientific publications is still challenging for various reasons. A crucial factor is that software dynamics with temporal versions or states are difficult to capture over time. We propose to archive and reference surrogates instead, which can be found on the Web and reflect the actual software to a remarkable extent. Our study shows that about a half of the webpages of software are already archived with almost all of them including some kind of documentation.

Accessing web archives from different perspectives with potential synergies

“…The websites corresponding to that software often nicely describe and document the tool or application. Furthermore, we found that for many purposes the archived versions can be considered surrogates of the corresponding software version that was referred to in an article [5]. In this case, the publication date is a good indicator, or at least a close estimate, of the target time for linking the publication and mentioned software.…”

“…To facilitate the discovery of an archived resource if the URL is unknown, different approaches to search Web archives by keywords have been proposed [1,2,3,4]. Another way for users to find and access archived pages is by linking past information on the current Web to the corresponding evidence in a Web archive [5]. In contrast to accessing Web archives by closely reading pages, like users do, archived contents can also be processed at scale, enabling evolution studies and big data analysis.…”

An Analytics Tool for Exploring Scientific Software and Related Publications

“…[4]), on the automatic understanding of scientific publications (e.g. [5]), or on linking publications with software and archiving them [6], there has been little work on joint analytics of scientific software and publications yet (e.g. [9]).…”