Schroedinger's code: A preliminary study on research source code availability and link persistence in astrophysics

TL;DR

This study investigates the availability and link persistence of research software and URLs in astrophysics articles from 2015, revealing that over half of the software had accessible source code and most URLs remained active.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of software availability and link stability in astrophysics research articles, highlighting current practices and challenges.

Findings

58% of software had available source code online

90% of extracted URLs remained accessible during testing

Over half of the software used was openly available

Abstract

We examined software usage in a sample set of astrophysics research articles published in 2015 and searched for source code for the software mentioned in these research papers. We categorized the software to indicate whether source code is available for download and whether there are restrictions to accessing it, and if source code is not available, whether some other form of the software, such as a binary, is. We also extracted hyperlinks from one journal's 2015 research articles, as links in articles can serve as an acknowledgment of software use and lead to data used in the research, and tested them to determine which of these URLs are still accessible. For our sample of 715 software instances in the 166 articles we examined, we were able to categorize 418 records as to availability of source code and found that 285 unique codes were used, 58% of which offer source code available online for download. Of the 2,558 hyperlinks extracted from 1,669 research articles, at best, 90% of them were available over our testing period.