Jupyter Notebooks as Discovery Mechanisms for Open Science: Citation Practices in the Astronomy Community

Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to facilitate access to research objects. Citation principles encourage authors to provide full descriptions of objects, with stable links, in their papers. As Jupyter notebooks (JNs) aggregate data, software, and other objects, they m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computing in science & engineering 2020-01, Vol.22 (1), p.5-15
Main Authors: Wofford, Morgan F., Boscoe, Bernadette M., Borgman, Christine L., Pasquetto, Irene V., Golshan, Milena S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
attribution
Citation analysis
Citations
credit
data citation
discovery
Hypertext systems
Jupyter notebooks
Knowledge discovery
Metadata
Object recognition
open science
Open systems
Research and development
Software
Software packages
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Summary:Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to facilitate access to research objects. Citation principles encourage authors to provide full descriptions of objects, with stable links, in their papers. As Jupyter notebooks (JNs) aggregate data, software, and other objects, they may facilitate or hinder citation, credit, and access to data and software. We report on a study of references to JNs in astronomy over a five-year period (2014–2018). References increased rapidly, but fewer than half of the references led to JNs that could be located and opened. JNs appear better suited to supporting the research process than to providing access to research objects. We recommend that authors cite individual data and software objects and that they stabilize any notebooks cited in publications. Publishers should increase the number of citations allowed in papers and employ descriptive metadata-rich citation styles that facilitate credit and discovery.
ISSN:1521-9615
1558-366X
DOI:10.1109/MCSE.2019.2932067