In AtlanMod , we are very proud of the large user base of our tools and of the benefits (and challenges!) that this brings to the team.
However, this has an undesired side-effect, our tools are by far more popular than the research papers describing/introducing them (e.g. Is there anyone out there that doesn´t know ATL ? but, how many of you could point to the paper that best describes ATL?).
If you are not a professional researcher you may be thinking “so what?”. The answer is easy: the current evaluation system for researchers (I´d say in any country) gives a lot of importance to the number of citations of paper but almost zero to the number of users of your tools. Simply put, a reference to our paper counts for the CV of all paper authors, indicating the url of a tool (even worse if it is just as a footnote or just by mentioning the tool) does not.
I’m not saying I agree with this (leading/creating widely used open source projects should, and can, be quantified and evaluated as part of the achievements of a researcher) but until then please think about us the next time you use one of our tools in your research work. We´ll really appreciate it.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
Jordi,
good point. In fact, sometimes I have found difficulties identifying which paper to cite when I want to cite ATL, AWM, KM3,…
It might be a good idea you have somewhere a list of tools/concepts and their associated “representative” publication — in a similar way that you have suggested that “the paper that best describes ATL” is the SciCo paper “ATL: A model transformation tool” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2007.08.002
This would also have the effect of avoiding the defragmentation caused by many people citing different papers for referring to the same tool (or concept, e.g., “megamodeling”)
My two cents,
Antonio Vallecillo.