Code Contribution and Credit in Science
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908750470709248 |
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| author | Brown, Eva Maxfield Slaughter, Isaac Weber, Nicholas |
| author_facet | Brown, Eva Maxfield Slaughter, Isaac Weber, Nicholas |
| contents | Software development has become essential to scientific research, but its relationship to traditional metrics of scholarly credit remains poorly understood. We develop a dataset of approximately 140,000 paired research articles and code repositories, and a predictive model that matches research article authors with software repository developer accounts. We use this dataset to investigate how software development activities influence credit allocation in collaborative scientific settings. Our findings reveal significant patterns distinguishing software contributions from traditional authorship credit. We find that $\sim$30\% of articles include non-author code contributors -- individuals who participated in software development but received no authorship recognition. While code-contributing authors provide a $\sim$4.2\% increase in article citations, this effect becomes non-significant when controlling for domain, article type, and open access status. First authors are significantly more likely to be code contributors than other author positions. Notably, we identify a negative relationship between coding frequency and scholarly impact metrics. Authors who contribute code more frequently exhibit progressively lower h-indices than non-coding colleagues, even when controlling for publication count, author position, domain, and article type. These results suggest a disconnect between software contributions and credit, highlighting important implications for institutional reward structures and science policy. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16242 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Code Contribution and Credit in Science Brown, Eva Maxfield Slaughter, Isaac Weber, Nicholas Software Engineering Digital Libraries Software development has become essential to scientific research, but its relationship to traditional metrics of scholarly credit remains poorly understood. We develop a dataset of approximately 140,000 paired research articles and code repositories, and a predictive model that matches research article authors with software repository developer accounts. We use this dataset to investigate how software development activities influence credit allocation in collaborative scientific settings. Our findings reveal significant patterns distinguishing software contributions from traditional authorship credit. We find that $\sim$30\% of articles include non-author code contributors -- individuals who participated in software development but received no authorship recognition. While code-contributing authors provide a $\sim$4.2\% increase in article citations, this effect becomes non-significant when controlling for domain, article type, and open access status. First authors are significantly more likely to be code contributors than other author positions. Notably, we identify a negative relationship between coding frequency and scholarly impact metrics. Authors who contribute code more frequently exhibit progressively lower h-indices than non-coding colleagues, even when controlling for publication count, author position, domain, and article type. These results suggest a disconnect between software contributions and credit, highlighting important implications for institutional reward structures and science policy. |
| title | Code Contribution and Credit in Science |
| topic | Software Engineering Digital Libraries |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16242 |