Credit Lost: Two Decades of Software Citation in Astronomy

Abstract

Software has been a crucial contributor to scientific progress in astronomy for decades, but practices that enable machine-actionable citations have not been consistently applied to software itself. Instead, software citation behaviors developed independently from standard publication mechanisms and policies, resulting in human-readable citations that remain hidden over time and that cannot represent the influence software has had in the field. These historical software citation behaviors need to be understood in order to improve software citation guidance and develop relevant publishing practices that fully support the astronomy community. To this end, a 23 year retrospective analysis of software citation practices in astronomy was developed. Astronomy publications were mined for 410 aliases associated with nine software packages and analyzed to identify past practices and trends that prevent software citations from benefiting software authors.

Examination of data citation guidelines in style manuals and data repositories

“…However, there is a lack of distinction between URLs and PIDs in the style manuals, and several manuals even present them as interchangeable. In fact, URLs are fragile and temporary locations, and due to their limitations, PIDs should replace URLs, and URLs may then become another piece of metadata associated with PIDs (Bouquin et al ., 2020; Lawrence et al ., 2011). PIDs play a more crucial role in facilitating access to data than URLs, and the distinction between URLs and PIDs should be clearly stated by style manuals and repositories.…”

Understanding progress in software citation: a study of software citation in the CORD-19 corpus

“…A body of research has investigated software visibility in the scholarly record, with results largely confirming the frustration research software practitioners express ( e.g. , Howison & Bullard, 2016 ; Pan et al, 2018 ; Bouquin et al, 2020 ). For instance, in contrast with the well established practice of citing publications, Howison and Bullard found through their examination of biology articles published between 2000 and 2010 that software citation “practices are varied and appear relatively ad hoc” ( Howison & Bullard, 2016 ).…”

“…Software is crucial to research, but its visibility in scholarly records is problematic, undermining research policy goals ( Mayernik et al, 2017 ; Howison & Bullard, 2016 ; Bouquin et al, 2020 ). These goals include facilitating more verifiable and reproducible research by explicitly referencing software in scholarly communications ( Howison & Bullard, 2016 ), ensuring sufficient credit for research software work within the scientific reputation economy ( Bouquin et al, 2020 ; Howison & Herbsleb, 2011 ), and tracking the research impact of software for decisions of funding and support ( Katz & Smith, 2015 ; Mayernik et al, 2017 ; Allen, Teuben & Ryan, 2018 ). Making software visible in scholarly communication and evaluation can enable these goals.…”

10. Que garder et pourquoi ?

“…Several new journals devoted to interdisciplinary investigations of data have launched in the last five years, such as the Harvard Data Science Review, Scientific Data, and the Journal of Data and Information Science, plus countless special issues of disciplinespecific journals. Interest in software preservation, software citation, and data citation continues to grow (Bouquin et al, 2020;Davenport et al, 2020;Smith et al, 2016;Software Heritage Foundation, 2019;Wofford et al, 2020). These venues, plus conferences, government reports, and funding initiatives serve to broaden the conversation about research data.…”