Our UA College of InfoSci capstone student, Swetha Kolloju, designed a poster for the College of InfoSci "iShowcase." In collaboration with Dr. Cristian Román-Palacios (Assistant Professor, UA College of InfoSci), we conducted a study of scientific software use and collaborations in phylogenetics. Swetha created bimodal networks to model scientific collaboration and software use. We asked: Do scientists with shared characteristics (language, national or regional university affiliation) tend to use the same software in computational biology, specifically, in phylogenetics?
Swetha found that most scientists tend to use the same software, but that bridging scientists (who use multiple software, e.g., BEAST2 and IQ-TREE) may be catalysts for new collaborations. While this pattern could benefit from a deeper investigation, we hypothesize that the scientists who bridge the "hub" software communities are valued for their expertise on multiple software platforms. In the linguistic analysis of software use, Swetha found that MEGA is most prevalent among papers written in Spanish and English. Interestingly, Spanish and Finnish scientists can boast the most diverse use of software: Spanish-writing scientists use MEGA, NDE, RAxML most often, and Finnish scientists use BEAST, TNT, and IQ-TREE.