[PROJ] PROJ: Scientific citations 2022 - 2024 overview

[Peter Löwe]

Hello PROJL 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 PROJ project. Since then, each new release of PROJ receives a DOI an is being long term preserved in the scientific Open Access Repository Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5884394), which is connected the DOI registration process.

Many persons from the PROJ developer team have connected their personal ORCID IDs (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) with the PROJ DOI. PROJ was the first OSGeo project to achieve this. The automated ORCI-DOI connection ensures that the ORCID accounts of the PROJ developers will receive automated updates (due scientfic credit) whenever a new PROJ release is published.

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

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

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

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

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

PROJ has been referenced in publications from IEEE, Springer, American Geophysical Society, MDPI and other publishers.

Since 2022, five publications were reported (2022: 3 publications, 2023: 2 publications, 2024: pending).

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 PROJ either traditionally or by DOI, such as the FOSS4G proceedings, but they are not connected to the CrossRef bibliography infrastructure (yet).



<peter.loewe at gmx.de>