Moving toward sustainable software citation practices to improve the quality of scientific research

Abstract

Software is essential for scientific research and is applied in research methodology, data analysis, and knowledge dissemination. Scientists believe that software plays a crucial role in their research process, so it is necessary to recognize the contribution of software developers. This study aims to investigate the current situation of software citation in scientific research and explore possible solutions to improve its sustainability via full-text content analysis. There is a gap between the use and the citation of software in scientific publications, and the lack of information in software citations has been a source of both failure and improvement of software in scientific research. We found various deficiencies that hinder the durability of software citations and put forward some suggestions for their stability and development, such as designing software citation standards, promoting free open licensing of scientific software, and implementing strict peer review of software citations.