Understanding Software in Research: Initial Results from Examining Nature and a Call for Collaboration

This lightning talk paper discusses an initial data set that has been gathered to understand the use of software in research, and is intended to spark wider interest in gathering more data. The initial data analyzes three months of articles in the journal Nature for software mentions. The wider activity that we seek is a community effort to analyze a wider set of articles, including both a longer timespan of Nature articles as well as articles in other journals. Such a collection of data could be used to understand how the role of software has changed over time and how it varies across fields.Comment: lightning talk submitted to WSSSPE5.2 (http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe5/

Understanding Software in Research: Examining Nature Articles

<p>The dataset contains a review of 40 <em>Nature </em>articles, consisting of an assessment of all of the research articles from January, February, and March of 2016. The articles were scored and metrics were collected on each individual and distinct mention of software in the articles. The mentions were characterized on how they were cited. Values pertaining to the overall collection of articles were also calculated. </p

Survey of National Postdoctoral Association - Dataset

<p>The dataset contains the responses from a survey conducted on the National Postdoctoral Association through the organization's mailing list. The responses were recorded through a Google Form that was accepting responses from 03/07/2017 to 04/06/2017. The names of the participants were not recorded, and other potential identifying information was removed from the dataset.</p