How to make software fit in research citation graphs

Kurzfassung

References between research products (papers, monographs, software, data, etc.) provide context, inform about predecessors and precedents, and make it possible to trace citation, which in turn provides credit for researchers and institutions. Together, research products, researchers, institutions, and the relations between them form a graph, a "research citation graph". With the increasing awareness of the importance of software for research, and ongoing efforts to make citation work for software, I look at modeling software and its specific properties into this kind of graph, which has traditionally been used for text-based publications only. In this talk, I propose some changes that need to be made to fit software and their dependencies into a citation graph. These changes pertain to differences across types of research product, and concepts specific to software. I will suggest how to implement these changes for a citation system which is better suitable for providing fair credit for research software than what we have right now. And finally, I will give an outlook on future work on automatically retrieving citation graphs for software, and weighting relations in them.