Transitive Credit as a Means to Address Social and Technological Concerns Stemming from Citation and Attribution of Digital Products

Citation: Daniel S. Katz (2014/07/09) Transitive Credit as a Means to Address Social and Technological Concerns Stemming from Citation and Attribution of Digital Products. Journal of Open Research Software (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.5334/jors.be
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.5334/jors.be
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.5334/jors.be
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Transitive Credit as a Means to Address Social and Technological Concerns Stemming from Citation and Attribution of Digital Products
Download: http://doi.org/10.5334/jors.be
Tagged: academia (RSS)

Summary

The pursuit of science depends on sharing data, developing data, writing software, creating methodologies, and annotating data. These are not accurately incentivized by publications. The choice of incentive metrics influences what science gets done.

Understanding academic dependencies requires a way of registering research output and a way of finding where it has been used. Assigning credit by author list is problematic because people have different standards for authorship. We already have a taxonomy of contribution kinds. One can also assign weights to each contribution kind, perhaps using a voting method.

One should also list software, data, and other artifacts which went into the research. Credit can be spread to them transitively. This also makes it easy to identify affected downstream artifacts when a bug is found.

The technological implementation of this idea in Katz and Smith is more fleshed out.