Software vs. data in the context of citation

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1 National Center for Supercomputing Applications & Electrical and Computer Engineering Department & School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States
2 School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, United States
3 Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
4 School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States
5 Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
6 Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire (CNRS), Orléans, France
7 Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands
8 Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States
9 Center for Behavior, Institutions & the Environment, Biosocial Complexity Initiative, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States
10 Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States
11 Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
12 Data Management Services, The Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2630v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Data Science, Scientific Computing and Simulation, Software Engineering
Keywords
software citation, data citation
Copyright
© 2016 Katz 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
Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, Smith AM, Anderson WL, Boettiger C, Hinsen K, Hooft R, Hucka M, Lee A, Löffler F, Pollard T, Rios F. 2016. Software vs. data in the context of citation. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2630v1

Abstract

Software is data, but it is not just data. While "data" in computing and information science can refer to anything that can be processed by a computer, software is a special kind of data that can be a creative, executable tool that operates on data. However, software and data are similar in that they both traditionally have not been cited in publications. This paper discusses the differences between software and data in the context of citation, by providing examples and referring to evidence in the form of citations.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.