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

TL;DR

This paper presents initial findings from analyzing software mentions in Nature articles to understand software's role in research and calls for community collaboration to expand this analysis across more journals and time periods.

Contribution

It introduces a preliminary dataset analyzing software mentions in Nature articles and advocates for a collaborative effort to extend this research across more publications.

Findings

Initial data covers three months of Nature articles

Highlights the need for broader, community-driven data collection

Aims to track changes in software's role over time and disciplines

Abstract

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.