Software now lies at the heart of scholarly research. Here we argue that as well as being important from a methodological perspective, software should, in many instances, be recognised as an output of research, equivalent to an academic paper. The article discusses the different roles that software may play in research and highlights the relationship between software and research sustainability and reproducibility. It describes the challenges associated with the processes of citing and reviewing software, which differ from those used for papers. We conclude that whilst software outputs do not necessarily fit comfortably within the current publication model, there is a great deal of positive work underway that is likely to make an impact in addressing this.

中文翻译：

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软件必须被视为学术研究的重要产出

软件现在是学术研究的核心。在这里，我们认为，除了从方法论的角度来看很重要之外，在许多情况下，软件还应该被视为研究成果，相当于一篇学术论文。本文讨论了软件在研究中可能扮演的不同角色，并强调了软件与研究可持续性和可重复性之间的关系。它描述了与引用和审查软件的过程相关的挑战，这些挑战与论文中使用的不同。我们得出的结论是，虽然软件输出不一定适合当前的出版模型，但有大量积极的工作正在进行中，可能会对解决这个问题产生影响。