Slashdot Mirror
The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software (nature.com)
An anonymous reader sends this news from Nature: For researchers who code, academic norms for tracking the value of their work seem grossly unfair. They can spend hours contributing to software that underpins research, but if that work does not result in the authorship of a research paper and accompanying citations, there is little way to measure its impact. ... Enter Depsy, a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to "measure the value of software that powers science."
[Postdoc researcher Klaus] Schliep's profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact.
[Postdoc researcher Klaus] Schliep's profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact.
...of the software and then request citations as parts of the license agreement. It's not a guarantee, and yes some will fail to cite properly, but at a present a short (possibly even conference) paper with a citation request really is you're best bet to get some credit.
The difficult part is finding a journal that will accept a description-of-software type paper *and* has a decent ranking. I'm somewhat lucky to have such a journal in my field, but I know that other fields are not so fortunate.