A Tale of Software Citation Pitfalls

Open Science contributes in many ways to a Knowledge Ecology. Opening research data and software to scientific and scholarly communities increases not only the transparency of results, but also facilitates the reuse of research artifacts. Citations are recognized as one of the key incentives to make data and software available, as credit is being transmitted to data producers and software developers. Research data and software citations make research results transparent and verifiable but they are hard to track, because there is no commonly-shared citation standard across communities. 

To combat this issue, FORCE11 proposed a set of data and software citation principles as guidance for authors which highlight that credit should be given via formal data and software citations using unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs). Despite their efforts, adoption of citation principles has been advancing slowly, and current citation practices remain idiosyncratic and thus hard to track.

This poster demonstrates common pitfalls of software citation practices in the scholarly writing process, which complicate the tracking of software citations: (a) not citing software at all, (b) mentions of the software name only as part of the full text, (c) citing a URL related to software rather than a software PID, and (d) citations to software-related research publications or software papers, which are not trackable by data citation discovery services. These pitfalls result in failure to transmit credit.

This poster will introduce one aspect of the interactive game “FAIRytale of Software Citations”, which presents the journey of software citations through multiple workflows and the pitfalls of software citations in a narrative with original illustrations. The story features the journey of a scholar carrying tokens of gratitude through the Shiver Forest of Scholarly Writing, facing multiple dangers in his path.