Ten simple rules for writing a comparative software review
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Computer Aided Design, Scientific Computing and Simulation, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- software review, gap analysis, how-to guide, ten simple rules, objective writing
- Copyright
- © 2016 Beeston et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Ten simple rules for writing a comparative software review. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2221v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2221v1
Abstract
We provide the following set of rules as a framework for researchers in any domain to undertake a comparative software review and determine the best software for their task.
Rule 1: State your credentials and motivation
Rule 2: Define and justify your scope
Rule 3: Perform a comprehensive search
Rule 4: Make your longlist data available to others
Rule 5: Summarise your software shortlist
Rule 6: Define the software quality criteria
Rule 7: Define the task suitability criteria
Rule 8: Mind the gaps
Rule 9: Summarise the findings as clearly as possible
Rule 10: Involve your community
Author Comment
Contributing to this draft: The authors encourage the community to contribute to the ongoing development of this paper. People can suggest additions and changes, or provide comments via the Google Doc at http://bit.ly/compsoftrev - please identify your contributions if you want them to be acknowledged. This work emerged from the Sustainable Software Institute Collaborations Workshop 2016, in Edinburgh, UK (23/03/2016). After a one or two-week period of the preprint being publicly available for comment, we intend to submit it to an open access journal to undergo formal peer-review.