Workflows for software citation and discovery

Software is fundamental to research. From short, thrown-together temporary scripts, through an abundance of complex spreadsheets analysing collected data, to the hundreds of software engineers and millions of lines of code behind international efforts such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Square Kilometre Array, software has made an invaluable contribution to advancing our research knowledge.

Within the Earth and Space Sciences, data is being generated, collected, processed and analysed in ever greater amounts and detail. However a major challenge for this field, as well many others, is that it can be hard to cite and reference software to improve credit and reproducibility.

FORCE11, a community-led forum for discussion of the future of research communication and e-Scholarship, has been advocating for the concept of software citation as a method to allow software developers and maintainers to receive academic credit for their work, by using persistent identifiers such as DOIs to enable researchers to more easily cite the software they use. The publication of the Software Citation Principles is the first step on a journey towards making research software more findable and reusable. In the Earth and Space Sciences, the ESIP Software and Services Citation Cluster is developing recommendations and best practices for software and services citations to take this forward.

This talk will summarise the Software Citation Principles, and give examples of workflows for software citation, software discovery and software credit that make use of them. It will also talk about the remaining challenges, and what the community can do to help overcome them.