Heartbeat: measuring installed base by analyzing downloadsand

Scientific Software Network Map

James Howison University of Texas at Austin

Downloads

• Great desire to measure something similar to sales and/or market share

• Early focus on downloads but …– A download is not a sale– No direct reward– Might be experimentation– Strongly correlated with number of releases

Installed Base

• How many regular users does a piece of software have?

Bibdesk daily downloads

Bibdesk installed base

What’s needed?

• High frequency data• Some notification of new releases, or• Some driver for frequent updates

Current work

• Focus on software work in science– No convenient central repositories!

• Focusing on understanding what software is used with what– Complements, not dependencies

• Linking metrics from publications to runtimes, and dependencies.

Mentions in publications?

@jameshowison DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1146366

Types of mentions in publicationsMention Type Example

Cite to Publication … was calculated using biosys (Swofford & Selander 1981).

Cite to Project Name or Website

… using the program Autodecay version 4.0.29 PPC (Eriksson 1998).Reference List has: ERIKSSON, T. 1998. Autodecay, vers. 4.0.29 Stockholm: Department of Botany.

Like Instrument … calculated by t-test using the Prism 3.0 software (GraphPad Software, San Diego, CA, USA).

URL in text … freely available from http://www.cibiv.at/software/pda/ .

In-text name mention only

… were analyzed using MapQTL (4.0) software.

Not even name mentioned

… was carried out using software implemented in the Java programming language.

@jameshowison DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1146366

Types of Mentions

Detecting complements

• http://scisoft-net-map.isri.cmu.edu/• http://scisoft-net-map.isri.cmu.edu:7777/• http://depsy.org/

Questions

• Ideas for discovering complements– Software used with other software

• Anyone interested in mining publications (or perhaps blogs etc) for software mentions– Gold standard dataset at:

github.com/jameshowison/softcite