The Challenge and Promise of Software Citation for Credit, Identification, Discovery, and Reuse

Software search is not a science, even among scientists: A survey of how scientists and engineers find software

“…Software is critical to research (Hannay et al, 2009;Hettrick, 2014;Howison and Bullard, 2015;Ince et al, 2012;Katz et al, 2016;Katz and Ramnath, 2015;Morin et al, 2012;Stewart et al, 2013;Wilson, 2006), yet finding software suitable for a given purpose remains surprisingly difficult (Bourne, 2015;Cannata et al, 2005;Howison and Bullard, 2015;White et al, 2014). Few resources exist to help users discover available options or understand the differences between them (White et al, 2014).…”

“…Other approaches to finding software, such as looking in the literature or asking on social media, suffer from still other problems such as the potential for incomplete or biased answers. The difficulty of finding software and the lack of better resources brings the potential for duplication of work, reduced scientific reproducibility, and poor return on investment by funding agencies (Cannata et al, 2005;Council, 2003;Crook et al, 2013;Niemeyer et al, 2016;Poisot, 2015;White et al, 2014).…”

What’s in the Box? Assessing the potential usability of four decades of thesis and dissertation supplementary files

“…This is a complex puzzle to solve, but recent moves to aggregate research data services efforts across organizations and expertise are likely to provide some resolution to these problems. Some examples of these cross-cutting efforts include the Data Curation Network project (Johnston et al 2017) project which seeks to offer distributed research data services expertise or the software citation efforts by Niemeyer et al (2016).…”

Theory and practice of data citation

“…Castelli et al (, p. 158) indicate data citation as the “main mechanism enabling the alignment and integration between data and publications in the scientific communication process.” This is also the idea behind executable papers or enhanced publications (Vernooy‐Gerritsen, ) that link data with textual publications allowing the data to be consulted or downloaded while reading a scientific paper in a digital form as well. Several studies (Aalbersberg, Heeman, Koers, & Zudilova‐Seinstra, ; Attwood et al, ; Bardi & Manghi, ; Brammer, Crosby, Matthews, & Williams, ; Jankowski, Scharnhorst, Tatum, & Tatum, ) have been dedicated to the definition and realization of enhanced publications, and they all to some extent require a methodology for citing data (and software/code) (Niemeyer et al, ). There is also the emerging idea of using data citation in conjunction with the Linked Data paradigm to create a “claim network evidence” spanning different documents (de Waard, ; Silvello, ).…”

“…At the institutional level, within the Horizon 2020 program, the European Commission has introduced the Open Research Data Pilot (ODP), which aims to improve and maximize the access to and reuse of research data and to increase the credit given to data creators; in the same vein, also the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom ask researchers applying for grants to provide data management plans describing how the data they use and produce will be shared and referenced (MacKenzie, ; Spengler, ). There is also evidence that: i) scientists respond to incentives and that increasing citation would drive software development and data sharing (Niemeyer, Smith, & Katz, ); ii) research activity increases when outputs are formally counted (McNaught, ); and iii) direct citations to data sets stimulate more data curation and data sharing than indirect citations through publications (Belter, ). Moreover, fundamental aspects of scientific research, such as reproducibility of experiments, the availability and discovery of scientific data, and the connection between scientific results with the data providing evidence, have been found to be closely connected with data citation (Honor, Haselgrove, Frazier, & Kennedy, ).…”