Enter Depsy, a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to "measure the value of software that powers science".
Schliep's [a post-doctoral researcher who has contributed to scientific software projects] profile on that site shows that he has contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares 34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software — putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by impact. "Depsy does a good job in finding all my software contributions," says Schliep.
Depsy's creators hope that their platform will provide a transparent and meaningful way to track the impact of software built by academics. The technology behind it was developed by Impactstory, a non-profit firm based in Vancouver, Canada, that was founded four years ago to help scientists to track the impact of their online output. That includes not just papers but also blog posts, data sets and software, and measuring impact by diverse metrics such as tweets, views, downloads and code reuse, as well as by conventional citations.
In effect, Depsy recognizes the "unsung heroes" of scientific software, says Jason Priem, co-founder of Impactstory, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation and various philanthropic foundations.
Is there something like Depsy for FOSS? If not, we could use one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2016, @01:31PM
Assuming they're just counting SLOC, the following would roughly suffice for git repos:
I haven't tested this though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2016, @01:40PM
They actually do quite a bit more.
1) Crawl papers for mentions of the software
2) Include authors of dependencies
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2016, @02:18PM
Blame LOC is a useless metric. It rewards cut-and-paste coding and gamesmanship edits of others' code.
The variable names weren't descriptive enough, so I fixed them - bingo, 200 LOC in my name.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday January 11 2016, @02:34PM
> find . -name '*.java'
> The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software
Surely should be fortran?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2016, @08:16PM
GP was talking about FOSS, not scientific software.
As a scientist writing FOSS, I can tell you that I've never used java, and I hate it when I need to use fortran. (I force my collaborators to replace fortran with C and matlab with python).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2016, @03:02PM
Do we really need "heroes" (sung or unsung) in science ? In some fields it is not that unusual to write at least some small tools to process your data, and thankfully in some fields free and open source software rather than black box number crunching prevails. (Fun fact - the impact factor of Acta Crystallographica A shot up from its usual 2 to 50 (surpassing Nature) when a short paper about a certain software package was published - most everybody in the field uses it, so they cite that paper.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Tuesday January 12 2016, @02:13AM
What we need is people releasing their programs under GPL. Re-inventing a square wheel, which is what most scientist-programmer tools look like, should really not be necessary in today's world with free collaboration sites like Github.