Software citations, information systems, and beyond

Abstract

Even though software plays an ever-increasing role in today’s research and engineering processes, the scholarly publication process has not quite caught up with this. In particular, referencing and citing software remains problematic. Citations for publications are wellstandardized but don’t immediately apply to software as, for instance, (a) software information is extremely heterogeneous, (b) software code is not persistent, and (c) the level of software information is often too coarse-granular. Current initiatives try to solve (a) by postulating “landing pages” for software that aggregate standardized meta-data and can be used as targets for citations and (b) by version-specific sub-landing pages. However no information services that provide such landing pages currently exist, making these proposals ineffective in practice. After an overview of the state-of-the-art, we propose to use swMATH’s information system for mathematical software as a source of landing pages, show an approach for version-specific sub-pages, and discuss approaches to cope with problem (c) (granularity).