Studying the impact of software in research - Examining current approaches to assessing the impact of software, and proposing novel methods and tools to better identify the impact of software

Software underpins the majority of current research. However it is only recently that data has started to be collected on its impact and role, driven by the alt-metrics movement. Software is often in the form of libraries which make it hard to assess the true impact.

A PhD project in this area would be expected to examine current approaches to assessing the impact of software, and propose novel methods and tools to better identify the impact of software. This may include topics including: software citation and discovery, integrating data from research impact studies, defining authorship credit, and automatic identification of software used in research.

Some of the specific challenges that our current work has identified which could be tackled in this research project include, but are not limited to:

1. How can we automatically identify a reference to a piece of software in a publication?
2. Do different disciplines/journals reference software in different ways?
3. Can we use open citations for software journals to create a corpus for software papers as structured data to make it easier to find out how they’re cited?
4. How quickly do references to software in papers decay?
5. Are there good metrics or indicators that consistently predict the academic or economic impact of software?
6. How should we reference other scholarly outputs in research software?
7. What are fair and efficient systems for handling authorship credit through a software project’s lifecycle?


Candidate requirements:

Applicants should have a good degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science or any subject where they have had experience of computational and data science techniques (e.g. computational sciences, computational social sciences, digital humanities). They should have experience of programming. It is desirable, but not essential, for the candidate to have some prior experience of developing tools, working with scholarly publishing APIs, text and data mining, data analysis (e.g. in R or Python/PANDAS), and interview/survey based work.


About The Centre:

As a PhD student you would be based at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), part of the University of Edinburgh. Founded in 1990, EPCC has been involved in parallel computing since the early days and is a leading European centre of excellence in advanced research, technology transfer and the provision of high-performance computing services to academia and industry. Based at The University of Edinburgh, we are one of Europe’s leading supercomputing centres. EPCC also leads the Software Sustainability Institute, which has collaborators from across the UK and internationally in the field of studying research software.


How to apply and request further information:

In order to apply for this PhD or request further information you should contact the supervisor, Neil Chue Hong, by using the form on this website.