The Depsy project has successfully concluded, and this website is no longer actively maintained.

It’s time to value the software that powers science.

Depsy helps build the software-intensive science of the future by promoting credit for software as a fundamental building block of science.
Learn more in this recent Nature article about us.

Credit when software is informally cited

Depsy text-mines papers to find fulltext mentions of software they use, revealing impacts invisible to citation indexes like Google Scholar.

Credit when software is reused

Citation is just part of the story—Depsy analyzes code from over half a million GitHub repositories to find how packages are reused by other software projects.

Credit for all software's authors

Depsy assigns fractional credit to contributors based on designated authorship,
number of commits, and repo ownership—supporting a fairer, more software-native reward system.

Check out some examples!

Depsy currently works for the 11,223 Python and R research software packages available on PyPI and CRAN. Here are a few interesting ones:
  • GDAL is a geoscience library. Depsy finds this cool NASA-funded ice map paper that mentions GDAL without formally citing it. Also check out key author Even Rouault: the project commit history demonstrates he deserves 27% credit for GDAL, even though he's overlooked in more traditional credit systems.
  • lubridate improves date handling for R. It's not highly-cited, but we can see it's making a different kind of impact: it's got a very high dependency PageRank, because it's reused by over 1000 different R projects on GitHub and CRAN.
  • BradleyTerry2 implements a probability technique in R. It's only directly reused by 8 projects—but Depsy shows that one of those projects is itself highly reused, leading to huge indirect impacts. This indirect reuse gives BradleyTerry2 a very high dependency PageRank score, even though its direct reuse is small, and that makes for a better reflection of real-world impact.
  • Michael Droettboom makes small (under 20%) contributions to other people's research software, contributions easy to overlook. But the contributions are meaningful, and they're to high-impact projects, so in Depsy's transitive credit system he ends up as a highly-ranked contributor. Depsy can help unsung heroes like Micheal get rewarded.