A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a research software package — describing its functionality, architecture, dependencies, testing, and intended uses — published in a venue that issues this format (JOSS, SoftwareX), accompanying the software release in a citable repository.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A JOSS paper describing a Python package for single-cell sequencing analysis, reviewed openly on GitHub

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A research article that uses an existing software tool is not a software paper

Editorial commentary

Software papers give citable scholarly credit for research software engineering work. JOSS reviews are open and focus on the software’s quality (tests, documentation, license) rather than on the novelty of any underlying algorithms. A software paper is a thin scholarly wrapper around a software citation.

References

Smith et al. 2016 ‘Software Citation Principles’ PeerJ CS
JOSS Journal of Open Source Software submission guidelines

Also known as

Software descriptor · Research software paper

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Software paper"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-paper" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-paper",
  "name": "Software paper",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-paper",
  "description": "A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a research software package — describing its functionality, architecture, dependencies, testing, and intended uses — published in a venue that issues this format (JOSS, SoftwareX), accompanying the software release in a citable repository.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-outputs#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-paper",
  "sameAs": [
    "Software descriptor",
    "Research software paper"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:04:44",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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