Software Citations in Political Science

Abstract

Political scientists rely on complex software to conduct research, and much of the software they use is written and distributed for free by other researchers. This article contends that creating and maintaining these public goods is costly for individual software developers but that it is not adequately incentivized by the academic community. We demonstrate that statistical software is used widely but rarely cited in political science, and we highlight a partial solution to this problem: software bibliographies. To facilitate their creation, we introduce softbib, an R package that scans analysis scripts, detects the software used in those scripts, and automatically creates bibliographies. We hope that recognizing the contribution of software developers to science will encourage more scholars to create public goods, which could yield important downstream benefits.