ArticleBioinformatics (Oxford, England)2024
Best practices to evaluate the impact of biomedical research software-metric collection beyond citations.
Article in Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Insights into the Datasets, Tools, and Training Needs of the AnVIL Community: 2024.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Power and sample size for reversible linear mixed models with clustering and longitudinality: GLIMMPSE Version 3.PloS one · 2025Article
- The crucial role of bioimage analysts in scientific research and publication.Journal of cell science · 2024Article
- Strategic priorities and challenges in research software funding: Results from an international survey.F1000Research · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
27 authors.
Funding
Abstract
motivationSoftware is vital for the advancement of biology and medicine. Impact evaluations of scientific software have primarily emphasized traditional citation metrics of associated papers, despite these metrics inadequately capturing the dynamic picture of impact and despite challenges with improper citation.
resultsTo understand how software developers evaluate their tools, we conducted a survey of participants in the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). We found that although developers realize the value of more extensive metric collection, they find a lack of funding and time hindering. We also investigated software among this community for how often infrastructure that supports more nontraditional metrics were implemented and how this impacted rates of papers describing usage of the software. We found that infrastructure such as social media presence, more in-depth documentation, the presence of software health metrics, and clear information on how to contact developers seemed to be associated with increased mention rates. Analysing more diverse metrics can enable developers to better understand user engagement, justify continued funding, identify novel use cases, pinpoint improvement areas, and ultimately amplify their software's impact. Challenges are associated, including distorted or misleading metrics, as well as ethical and security concerns. More attention to nuances involved in capturing impact across the spectrum of biomedical software is needed. For funders and developers, we outline guidance based on experience from our community. By considering how we evaluate software, we can empower developers to create tools that more effectively accelerate biological and medical research progress. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: More information about the analysis, as well as access to data and code is available at https://github.com/fhdsl/ITCR_Metrics_manuscript_website.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.