Assessing the Impact of Outreach Through Software Citation for Community Software in Geodynamics

The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics is a community of software users and user-developers who model physical processes in the Earth and planetary interiors. From 2010 to 2018, the community of researchers published upward of 638 peer-reviewed papers in more than 124 venues. We analyzed this corpus of publications to understand the impact of CIG workshops and tutorials, measured through software citation. We automated article analysis using text extraction and tokenization techniques. Patterns in co-mentioned software suggest that usage for some tools cross-cuts many domains, indicating their broad impact. Network analysis of coauthorship and participation in tutorials and hackathons reveal both are effective methods to grow software communities and the importance of developers in bridging research groups and expanding networks. Networks show that workshops broaden the reach of users beyond the developers while hackathons broaden the developer base creating greater collaboration opportunities for hackathon participants.