DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Citation method, please? A case study in astrophysics

11/24/2021
by   Alice Allen, et al.
ASCL
0

Software citation has accelerated in astrophysics in the past decade, resulting in the field now having multiple trackable ways to cite computational methods. Yet most software authors do not specify how they would like their code to be cited, while others specify a citation method that is not easily tracked (or tracked at all) by most indexers. Two metadata file formats, codemeta.json and CITATION.cff, developed in 2016 and 2017 respectively, are useful for specifying how software should be cited. In 2020, the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL, ascl.net) undertook a year-long effort to generate and send these software metadata files, specific to each computational method, to code authors for editing and inclusion on their code sites. We wanted to answer the question, "Would sending these files to software authors increase adoption of one, the other, or both of these metadata files?" The answer in this case was no. Furthermore, only 41 of these files had citation information in any form available. The lack of such information creates an obstacle for article authors to provide credit to software creators, thus hindering citation of and recognition for computational contributions to research and the scientists who develop and maintain software.

READ FULL TEXT
04/24/2020

Jupyter notebooks as discovery mechanisms for open science: Citation practices in the astronomy community

Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to faci...
12/06/2017

Software metadata: How much is enough?

Broad efforts are underway to capture metadata about research software a...
06/14/2019

Software and Dependencies in Research Citation Graphs

Following the widespread digitalization of scholarship, software has bec...
06/14/2019

Software and their Dependencies in Research Citation Graphs

Software is essential for a lot of research, but it is not featured in c...
05/04/2020

EngMeta – Metadata for Computational Engineering

Computational engineering generates knowledge through the analysis and i...
01/23/2020

Referencing Source Code Artifacts: a Separate Concern in Software Citation

Among the entities involved in software citation, software source code r...
02/06/2019

Close-reading of Linked Data: a case study in regards to the quality of online authority files

More and more cultural institutions use Linked Data principles to share ...