Biomedical Open Source Software: Crucial Packages and Hidden Heroes

Abstract

Despite the importance of scientific software for research, it is often not formally recognized and rewarded. This is especially true for foundation libraries, which are used by the software packages visible to the users, being "hidden" themselves. The funders and other organizations need to understand the complex network of computer programs that the modern research relies upon. In this work we used CZ Software Mentions Dataset to map the dependencies of the software used in biomedical papers and find the packages critical to the software ecosystems. We propose the centrality metrics for the network of software dependencies, analyze three ecosystems (PyPi, CRAN, Bioconductor) and determine the packages with the highest centrality.