[gdal-dev] Scientific citations 2022 - 2024 overview

[Peter Löwe]

Hello GDAL community,

this is an update and preliminary summary about references to the GDAL project (and developer community) within scientific publications since 2022.

In 2022, a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was registered for the GDAL project. Since then (version 3.5.1), each new release of GDAL receives a DOI an is being long term preserved in the scientific Open Access Repository Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.5884351), which is connected the DOI registration process.

The DOI infrastructure allows to reference either the GDAL project as a whole or a particular GDAL version in scientific literature.

The GDAL project has become an early adopter regarding DOI use within OSGeo.

While there are still sometimes technical glitches in the GDAL-Zenodo-DOI workflows, we have now tangible proof of the resulting benefits:

Whenever a GDAL DOI is referenced in a scientic journal (which uses the CrossRef infrastructure for bibliographic citations), this can be tracked down and reported.

A listing of the publications citing GDAL in this manner is available here: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/DOI#GDAL

GDAL has been referenced in publications from Nature, Springer, Wiley, American Geophysical Society and other publishers.

Since 2022, sixteen publications were reported (2022: 6 publications, 2023: 7 publications, 2024: 3 publications (so far)).

While these numbers might appear small, this is a very interesting development about the recognition of open source software as a part of open science.

Congratulations & best regards,
Peter

PS: There are actually many more publications citing GDAL, such as the FOSS4G proceedings, but they are not connected to the CrossRef bibliography infrastructure (yet).




<peter.loewe at gmx.de>