Tracking citations to research software via PIDs

Abstract

Tracking citations to research software via persistent identifiers is difficult due to dilution of citations over many PIDs assigned to a software package. On top of this, software citations are often consistently being edited out by every actor part of the scholarly communication process such as reference managers, publishers, professors and discovery systems. Thus, the survival rate of a software citation is extremely low in the current scholarly ecosystem. The Sloan-funded Asclepias project is a collaboration between a publisher, discovery system and repository with the goal to promote scientific software into an identifiable, citable, and preservable object. We have built a citation broker that is currently tracking some 6.000 citations to Zenodo DOIs from NASA ADS, CrossRef and EuropePMC.