Category Archives: software citation

Codes past, still present (updated 8/21/2019)

At lunch yesterday, I was asked in what year the earliest code ASCL has was written (or was first created). I didn’t know off the top of my head, but thought probably in late 70s. (The earliest I ever pursued was from the 60s, IIRC, & though I found an working email address for the woman who wrote it, which was amazing in itself, she no longer had the code, alas.)

But the question got me to wondering, so in a quick look, here’s what I found: three codes that were initially created in 1978:

Cloudy (ascl:9910.001)
AIPS (ascl:9911.003)
ADIPLS (ascl:1109.002)

All of these have undergone further development and are still in use, as indicated by citations to them in papers published this year.

Are these the most long-lived codes we have? Are there codes that were started even before 1978 that are still in use? Probably. Maybe part of the Starlink (ascl:1110.012) code base? Something else?

If you know of one or can find one in the ASCL with a history that goes back further than 1978, please let us know in the replies.

UPDATE, August 21, 2019

Screenshot of tweet about the STARS code and its origins in the early 1970sYes! There is one code that goes back even further, to 1972. Warrick Ball (@warrickball), a postdoc at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), replied on Twitter that the stellar evolution code STARS (ascl:1107.008) got its start in 1971, and the 1972 article which describes the code is listed in the ASCL entry for it. The code is still in use and was cited earlier this year. There’ll be dark chocolate heading Dr. Ball’s way as soon as the weather cools off; kudos to him for finding the answer to this question!

No, limits on references in prestigious journals are not harming software citation

In June, I was invited to participate in a one-day workshop as a member of an expert panel for the The Open Source Software Health Index Project. The subject of software citation came up at lunch with other panel members, and someone suggested that because of the limit on references in prestigious publications, citations for software may be dropped to make room for article citations. This surprised me, since I know that several highly-regarded journals have published articles on the importance of research software, have edited their author guidelines to include more and better information on citing software properly, and have improved how citations to ASCL entries, for example, are treated to ensure their proper capture and tracking by indexers.

So I wrote to editors at a number of prestigious publications such as Nature and Science to ask whether their publications might consider exempting software citations from the reference limits. The prompt replies stated that there is no need to do so: there is room for essential references, and even if there are (soft) limits on the number of references in the main text in the print journal, they are unlimited in the online supplementary materials, the reference list appears in full on the website (the version that has the most readers), and all are picked up (or at least made available for ingestion) as citations in bibliographic databases.

Here is a case in point: this Science paper was printed with a limited number of references, but all 113 appear in the online version, and 92 of them were captured by ADS. Those not captured by ADS include one of the four software references, which is only a link to a website, and other references that are similarly not formatted well for tracking or are to resources ADS does not ingest.

Science citation list screenshot showing end of reference list for 113 references

 

 

ADS screenshot showing that 92 references were captured

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m very pleased — and relieved! — to know the commitment to have code cited well carries over to practice and that limiting citations in print format, when this might occur, does not appear to inhibit nor restrict software citation.