Software Citation

Based on the "Sustainable Software Development for Researchers" alias "Bring Your Own Script and Make It Ready for Publication" workshop, this guide is a short overview about the steps recommended to make your code sustainable, enabling others to use and modify it. 

The British Library, The oftware Sustainability Institute and The Alan Turing Institute are co-organising a workshop on Software Citation on the 13th and 14th May 2019 at the British Library, to raise the profile of the topic, provide information and address current challenges.

By Daniel S. Katz, Daina Bouquin and Neil Chue Hong. This blog post was originally published in Daniel S. Katz's blog. Identification of software is essential to a number of important issues, such as citation, provenance, and reproducibility. Here, we are focusing on issues related to citation. Identification can be thought of as a subset of naming. Some important questions are therefore: How do we name things? How do we know how things are named? And who gets to name things?

By Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Stefan Verhoeven, Tom Klaver, Jason Maassen, (Netherlands eScience Center) and Stephan Druskat (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin). This post was originally published at the NL eScience Center blog. The Netherlands eScience Center currently employs about 50 Research Software Engineers who work side-by-side with domain scientists to address technological challenges that need to be overcome in order to answer the research questions.

By Stephan Druskat, Daniel S. Katz, David Klein, Mark Santcroos, Tobias Schlauch, Liz Sexton-Kennedy, and Anthony Truskinger. Like the behemoth cruise ship leaving the harbour of Amsterdam that overshadowed our discussion table at WSSSPE 6.1, credit for software is a slowly moving target, and it’s a non-trivial task to ensure that the right people get due credit. In this blog post, we aim to review the current state of practice in terms of credit for research software. We also attempt to summarise recent developments and outline a more ideal state of affairs.

By Stephan Druskat, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Netherlands eScience Center, and Alexander Struck. In order to enable attribution and credit for Research Software Engineers, and other developers of and contributors to research software, software must be made citable, and must be cited. One of the obstacles for correct and comprehensive software citation is the lack, or suboptimal discoverability, of relevant metadata. While, for instance, papers provide their metadata quite obviously (i.e., title, authors, containing publication, publication date, etc.), software hardly ever does.

Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE) is calling for papers for an upcoming special issue to be published in January/February 2020. This issue will examine the state of software and data citation, inform the community of the excellent resources available to advance research and education goals, and inform future directions for research and implementation.

The citation of research software has a number of purposes, most importantly attribution and credit, but also the provision of impact metrics for funding proposals, job interviews, etc.