Understanding Software in Research: Initial Results from Examining Nature and a Call for Collaboration
This work addresses the need for systematic data on software usage in scientific research, but it is incremental as it presents initial results and seeks broader collaboration.
The paper analyzed three months of Nature articles to identify software mentions, aiming to understand software's role in research and called for a community effort to expand data collection across journals and time.
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.