Software Curation in Research Libraries: Practice and Promise

Chassanoff, Alexandra; Borghi, John; AlNoamany, Yasmin; Thornton, Katherine A.

doi:10.31219/osf.io/fb5s8

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…Despite the long history of software's involvement in the scientific practice (Wolfram, 1984), it is not until recently did researchers start to perceive software as a first-class research object, one that needs to be "validated, preserved, cited, and credited" (Chassanoff, Borghi, AlNoamany, & Thornton, 2018). As arguably the most important component in the contemporary academic reward system (Garfield & Merton, 1979), being citable is the prerequisite for software to hold this position.…”

Section: Software Citation Standardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

Chen

Yan

2019

Journal of Informetrics

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The rise of software as a research object is mirrored in the increasing interests towards quantitative studies of scientific software. However, due to the inconsistent practice of citing software, most of the existing studies analyzing the impact of scientific software are based on identification of software name mentions in full-text publications. Despite its limitations, citation data have a much larger quantity and broader coverage of scientific fields than full-text data and thus could support findings in much larger scopes. This paper presents an analysis aiming to evaluate the extent to which citations data can be used to reconstruct the impact of software. Specifically, we identified the variety of citable objects related to the lme4 R package and examined how the package's impact is scattered across these objects. Our results reveal a littlediscussed challenge of using citation data to measure the impact of software, that even within the category of formal citation, there might be different forms in which the same software object is cited. This challenge can be mitigated by more carefully selecting objects as the proxy of software. However, it cannot be fully solved until we have one-software-one-proxy policy for software citation.

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Section: Software Citation Standardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

Chen

Yan

2019

Journal of Informetrics

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“…In part, this can be attributed to the conceptual, technical, and social challenges bound up in devising caretaking strategies in this sphere. Complexities run the gamut, from simply defining software as a preservation object to established methods optimizing the potential for reuse (Chassanoff, Borghi, AlNoamany, & Thornton, ).…”

Section: Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curation as “Interoperability With the Future”: Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries

Chassanoff

Altman

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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This article considers the problem of preserving research software within the wider realm of digital curation, academic research libraries, and the scholarly record. We conducted a pilot study to understand the ecosystem in which research software participates, and to identify significant characteristics that have high potential to support future scholarly practices. A set of topical curation dimensions were derived from the extant literature and applied to select cases of institutionally significant research software. This approach yields our main contribution, a curation model and decision framework for preserving research software as a scholarly object. The results of our study highlight the unique characteristics and challenges at play in building curation services in academic research libraries.

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“…As is evident in the above description, reproducibility-related efforts involving software often, but not always, overlap with those related to data. However, software presents a number of unique challenges compared to data and other research products (Chassanoff et al, 2018). Even defining the bounds of the term ''software'' is challenging.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Preserving and maintaining research software present multiple challenges for researchers and institutions (Chassanoff et al, 2018). The complex nature of software makes it hard to decide what to preserve to enable the re-use of software in the future (Rios, 2017).…”

Section: Preserving Research Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software

AlNoamany

Borghi

2018

PeerJ Computer Science

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Research software, which includes both source code and executables used as part of the research process, presents a significant challenge for efforts aimed at ensuring reproducibility. In order to inform such efforts, we conducted a survey to better understand the characteristics of research software as well as how it is created, used, and shared by researchers. Based on the responses of 215 participants, representing a range of research disciplines, we found that researchers create, use, and share software in a wide variety of forms for a wide variety of purposes, including data collection, data analysis, data visualization, data cleaning and organization, and automation. More participants indicated that they use open source software than commercial software. While a relatively small number of programming languages (e.g., Python, R, JavaScript, C++, MATLAB) are used by a large number, there is a long tail of languages used by relatively few. Between-group comparisons revealed that significantly more participants from computer science write source code and create executables than participants from other disciplines. Differences between researchers from computer science and other disciplines related to the knowledge of best practices of software creation and sharing were not statistically significant. While many participants indicated that they draw a distinction between the sharing and preservation of software, related practices and perceptions were often not aligned with those of the broader scholarly communications community.

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Software Curation in Research Libraries: Practice and Promise

Cited by 3 publications

References 17 publications

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

Curation as “Interoperability With the Future”: Preserving Scholarly Research Software in Academic Libraries

Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software

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