TL;DR: cite the software you use in your research!

In lab meeting the other day someone asked what the major R packages for analyzing psycholinguistic data are, and I had a hard time thinking of any.¹ That made me think about why software is such a small part of our scholarly output. Part of the reason might simply be that there’s not enough overlap in the specific kinds of analyses we do to justify creating brand new packages, rather than using domain-general tools (like the tidyverse).

But I think there may be a deeper explanation: it’s hard to write good, useful software, and academia does not reward that particular kind of hard work.

Designing, implementing, and maintaining software packages is difficulty at best and downright consuming at worst. Being involved with developing and maintaining some of the JuliaStats packages has shown me how much work and energy goes into just providing support to users and keeping things from breaking as the language changes and other packages are updated. And, if I’m being honest, the packages of my own research code that I’ve released (beliefupdatr and phondisttools) are not particularly well-crafted. I basically pushed them out the door when I submitted the papers behind them in the spirit of openness and the hope that they might be useful to someone else. And I think they have been! But they could be so much better—more flexible, ergonomic, intuitive, integrated—and if they were I suspect their utility would be much greater. Of course, I fix problems, bugs, and incompatibilities with new versions of R as they come up, but I barely have time for that. Making a package that is truly useful to other people requires a huge amount of careful, laborious work to design and implement.

As an academic—especially those at the junior professor stage, as I am now—you are constantly faced with competing demands on your time and energy. A major consideration is whether investing time in some activity will lead to more of the gold stars which allow you to advance in your career. Right now, in my field, those gold stars are citations, and (at least if the conventional wisdom is to be believed) any activity that does not lead to more gold stars (citations) is, essentially, a leisure activity. Absent any change in incentives and from a purely careerist perspective (which I don’t necessarily endorse), it’s not worth it to me to spend the time to develop useful software. So, what do we get? A lot of cobbled-together one-off scripts and notebooks, useful only for the project at hand, guided by oral tradition/lab culture, and (hopefully) dumped on the internet in a well-intentioned attempt at openness.

Which brings me the take-home message of this post: cite the software you use. This is especially important if that software is open-source software. Citing software is important for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it feels good to see your software acknowledged as useful in such a public forum, and developing open source software can often feel like a thankless slog. But there are two reasons I want to highlight here. First, you’re rewarding the people who write and maintain that software, in a way that for your fellow academics will directly help them get a job, tenure, or a promotion. Second, by citing software you treat it just like any other piece of intellectual labor you’re building on to do your work, and in doing so you normalize the idea that good software is useful intellectual labor which should be valued and encouraged by the academy.

Of course, not all code you write is software, in the sense of a product that’s usable by a third party for a task that may be very different than you originally intended. But my hunch is that there’s a lot of very useful software hiding out there in bits of one-off research code,² and that if we rewarded academics at all for doing the work to take that one-off code over the top to being useful software we’d collectively save ourselves a lot of wheel-reinventing. So, if you use software, cite it. If you’re using an R package, you can get a citation with citation:

citation('rmarkdown')

To cite package ‘rmarkdown’ in publications use:

  JJ Allaire, Yihui Xie, Jonathan McPherson, Javier Luraschi, 
  Kevin Ushey, Aron Atkins, Hadley Wickham, Joe Cheng and Winston
  Chang (2018). rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R. R package
  version 1.10. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R},
    author = {JJ Allaire and Yihui Xie and Jonathan McPherson and 
      Javier Luraschi and Kevin Ushey and Aron Atkins and Hadley
      Wickham and Joe Cheng and Winston Chang},
    year = {2018},
    note = {R package version 1.10},
    url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown},
  }

Finally, I should be clear that I’ve been remiss in citing the software I use. I’m trying to do better but it’s hard to form new citation habits!