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Record W4409090679 · doi:10.1109/mcse.2025.3557236

Do Research Software Engineers and Software Engineering Researchers Speak the Same Language?

2025· article· en· W4409090679 on OpenAlexaff
Timo Kehrer, Robert Haines, Guido Juckleand, David E. Bernholdt

Bibliographic record

VenueComputing in Science & Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersOffice of ScienceOak Ridge National LaboratoryUT-BattelleAdvanced Scientific Computing ResearchU.S. Department of Energy
KeywordsSoftware engineeringSoftwareComputer scienceSoftware peer reviewSocial software engineeringEngineeringEngineering ethicsSoftware developmentSoftware constructionProgramming language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and Software Engineering Researchers (SERs) often use different terminologies for similar concepts, creating communication challenges. To better understand these divergences, we have started investigating how SE fundamentals from the SER community are interpreted within the RSE community, identifying aligned concepts, knowledge gaps, and areas for potential adaptation. Our preliminary findings reveal opportunities for mutual learning and collaboration, and our systematic methodology for terminology mapping provides a foundation for a crowd-sourced extension and validation in the future.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.201
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.422
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.799
Threshold uncertainty score0.985

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.2010.422
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0090.010
Science and technology studies0.0080.024
Scholarly communication0.0220.053
Open science0.0040.014
Research integrity0.0060.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.045
GPT teacher head0.362
Teacher spread0.318 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designQualitative
DomainMethods
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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