How to find and evaluate good research software - a field report

The Helmholtz Association strongly promotes the field of research software engineering. Among other activities, the Helmholtz Research Software Directory (RSD) was developed and the Helmholtz Software Award was launched. But these great initiatives have raised questions: 

·         How exactly do you find the great software?

·         How do you encourage the development teams to publish it and describe it in such a way that not only insiders understand what it's all about?

·         How can international reviewers be recruited and how can they evaluate software applications in areas they are not specialized on?

·         How do you compare and evaluate software that differs greatly not only in terms of technical aspects, but also in terms of maturity, user community and target groups?

The Helmholtz RSD has developed into a successful repositoiry and is increasingly bringing added value to software developers and scientists. The first Helmholtz Software Prize 2023 was awarded in three categories and the applications for the second call 2024 have been received and are being reviewed. At the same time the topic of evaluating research results, including data and software, has recently become increasingly important. Here too, the evaluation of research software is playing an important role.    

In this presentation, the experiences and results of these processes will be presented in detail. The topics mentioned and still in flux are of growing importance for universities, research institutions and also the NFDI consortia!  These experiences in this still relatively new field are therefore valuable information and a basis for discussions in the RSE community!