Research Software Management

In recent years the use and development of research software by researchers has overwhelmingly increased in many scientific fields. In research fields covering computational sciences and astronomy, research software has always been the main tool to carry out data analysis and modeling, often created by the researchers themselves.  

Being an important research output, however, research software doesn’t always receive the recognition it deserves and the precautions needed to enable its long-term sustainability and maintenance are often neglected. Therefore, to create and maintain the quality of research software, one needs to follow best practices to achieve a reproducible workflow.

Research software encompasses source code, scripts, notebooks, algorithms, workflows, libraries, and applications that are created, modified, or maintained to generate, process, analyse, simulate, visualise, or reproduce research results. Unlike general-purpose software used during research, research software is itself a research output that should be managed, documented, shared, and cited to support reproducibility and reuse.