Assessing Impact of Outreach through Software Citation in Geodynamics

The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics is a community of software users and user-developers who model physical processes in the Earth and planetary interiors. From 2010-2018, the community of researchers published upward of 638 peer reviewed papers in more than 124 venues. We analyzed this corpus of publications to understand the impact of CIG workshops and tutorials, measured through software citation. We automated article analysis using text extraction and tokenization techniques. Patterns in co-mentioned software suggest that usage for some tools cross-cuts many domains.

We discovered through network analysis that tutorials and hackathons are both effective methods to grow software communities. The project drew on our expertise in network analysis and text-mining of PDF documents. Our paper, “Assessing Impact of Outreach through Software Citation for Community Software in Geodynamics,” was submitted to IEEE Transactions on Computing in Science and Engineering.

Project Partners: Lorraine Hwang (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences) and Rich Pauloo (PhD candidate in Hydrogeology).